A Spectral-Tchebychev Solution for Three-Dimensional Vibrations of Parallelepipeds Under Mixed Boundary Conditions

Abstract

Vibration behavior of structures with parallelepiped shape—including beams, plates, and solids—are critical for a broad range of practical applications. In this paper we describe a new approach, referred to here as the three-dimensional spectral-Tchebychev (3D-ST) technique, for solution of three-dimensional vibrations of parallelepipeds with different boundary conditions. An integral form of the boundary-value problem is derived using the extended Hamilton’s principle. The unknown displacements are then expressed using a triple expansion of scaled Tchebychev polynomials, and analytical integration and differentiation operators are replaced by matrix operators. The boundary conditions are incorporated into the solution through basis recombination, allowing the use of the same set of Tchebychev functions as the basis functions for problems with different boundary conditions. As a result, the discretized equations of motion are obtained in terms of mass and stiffness matrices. To analyze the numerical convergence and precision of the 3D-ST solution, a number of case studies on beams, plates, and solids with different boundary conditions have been conducted. Overall, the calculated natural frequencies were shown to converge exponentially with the number of polynomials used in the Tchebychev expansion. Furthermore, the natural frequencies and mode shapes were in excellent agreement with those from a finite-element solution. It is concluded that the 3D-ST technique can be used for accurate and numerically efficient solution of three-dimensional parallelepiped vibrations under mixed boundary conditions.