A New Solution Method for Vibration Analysis of Circular Cylindrical Thin Shells with a Circumferential Surface Crack

Abstract

In this paper, a new solution method is proposed for determining the natural frequency of a given mode for a finite-length circular cylindrical thin shell with a circumferential part-through crack. The governing equation of the cracked cylindrical shell is derived by integrating the line-spring model with the classical thin shell theory. The proposed method calculates the natural frequency from an initial trial to satisfy both the governing equations and appropriate boundary conditions through an optimization process. The initial trial is proposed to satisfy the governing equations by using the beam modal function to determine the modal wavenumbers and mode shapes of cylindrical shells in the axial direction, assuming the flexural mode shapes of cylindrical shells in the axial direction to be of the same form as that of a flexural vibration beam with the same boundary conditions. Four representative sets of boundary conditions are considered: simply supported (SS-SS), clamped-clamped (C-C), clamped-simply supported (C-SS), and clamped-free (C-F). Compared with the finite element (FE) method, the proposed solution method is verified to provide an accurate and efficient way to calculate the dynamic characteristics of both intact and cracked cylindrical shells.