A NEW METHOD FOR FREE VIBRATION ANALYSIS OF COMPOSITE LAMINATED SHELLES OF REVOLUTION

A semi-analytical domain decomposition approach is proposed for free vibration analysis of laminated composite shells of revolution subjected to arbitrary boundary conditions. A laminated shell structure is divided into some shell segments along the axis of revolution. The geometrical boundaries are treated as special interfaces as those between two adjacent shell segments. All interface continuity constraints are incorporated into the system potential functional by means of a subdomain generalized variational principle and least-squares weighted residual method. Double mixed series, i.e. the Fourier series and Chebyshev orthogonal polynomials, are adopted as assumed admissible displacement functions for each shell segment. In order to validate the proposed formulation, typical laminated shells of revolution, such as circular cylindrical, conical and spherical shells, with various combinations of edge support conditions, are examined. The numerical results obtained from the present method show good agreement with previously published results. The present solution is very effcient, robust and accurate. The computational advantage of the approach can be exploited to gather useful and rapid information about the effects of geometry and boundary conditions on the vibrations of laminated composite shells of revolution.