Free Vibration Characteristics Investigation in Composite Laminated Open Cylindrical Shells.

The shell vibration problem is of continuing interest due to their rampant use as structural members. Often these shells are made of laminated composites. These laminated shells have a very wide range of applications, particularly in aerospace, military hardware, marine ships, and civil constructions, as well as an integral part of machines where they are subjected to dynamic loading hence their vibratory analysis, is important for efficient, reliable and failure-proof design. Composite laminated open shells in these applications are employed with various boundary conditions. Understanding the vibration characteristics of these shell components is particularly important for engineers to design suitable structures with low vibration and noise radiation characteristics. The present work investigates the free vibration characteristics of composite laminated open cylindrical shells for general boundary conditions using a unified Chebyshev-Ritz formulation. The Rayleigh-Ritz method based on the energy functional of the open cylindrical shell has been used to obtain solutions. The method has been validated with standard reference and a convergence test of this method has also been done. A parametric study has been done including the effect of aspect ratio, lamination scheme, width-to-radius ratio, thickness-to-radius ratio, and boundary conditions. The analytical results have also been compared with the numerical results obtained using finite element solver ANSYS.