Free Vibrations of Beams with Arbitrary Boundary Conditions Based on Wave Propagation Method

Abstract

Under the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory, the wave propagation method is used for the vibration analysis of beams with arbitrary boundary conditions. The boundary conditions end the beam could be arbitrary that all the conventional homogeneous beam boundary conditions can be included by setting the stiffnesses of the springs be infinity or zero. In this paper, the flexural displacement of the beam is expressed in the wave propagation form including wave numbers. The wavenumber could be obtained in a known form for conventional boundary conditions. So the results are obtained through the boundary conditions and the known wavenumbers and compared with the numerical results. In order to validate the correctness, results with different stiffness are compared with those obtained by previous published papers.