Curvature Effects on the Vibration Characteristics of Doubly Curved Shallow Shells with General Elastic Edge Restraints

Effects of curvature upon the vibration characteristics of doubly curved shallow shells are assessed in this paper. Boundary conditions of the shell are generally specified in terms of distributed elastic restraints along the edges. The classical homogeneous boundary supports can be easily simulated by setting the stiffnesses of restraining springs to either zero or infinite. Vibration problems of the shell are solved by a modified Fourier series method that each of the displacements is invariably expressed as a simple trigonometric series which converges uniformly and acceleratedly over the solution domain. All the unknown expansion coefficients are treated equally as a set of independent generalized coordinates and solved using the Rayleigh-Ritz technique. The current method provides a unified solution to the vibration problems of curved shallow shells involving different geometric properties and boundary conditions with no need of modifying the formulations and solution procedures. Extensive tabular and graphical results are presented to show the curvature effects on the natural frequencies of the shell with various boundary conditions.