Vibration Isolation Design for Periodical Stiffened Shells by the Wave Finite Element Method

Abstract

Thin plates and shells are widely used to reduce the weight in modern mechanical systems, in particularly for the aeronautic and astronautical machineries. These thin structures can result in intensive modes, and lead to the difficulty on the suppression of vibration. The excessive vibration of casing can not only lead to the failure itself but also has a significant influence on the related external pipelines and other attachments which could cause the fatigue failure for the aero-engine casings. A proper method is needed to investigate the dynamic characteristics for these casings, and to be potentially further used for the vibration isolation design. Periodic structure has received a great deal of attentions for its band gap characteristics. Sound and other vibration can be forbidden to propagate in its band gap. With regard to the applications in aero-engines, the article provides one probable vibration isolation method for the stiffened plates and shells with high strength-to-weight ratio and with periodic configuration characteristics. The vibration characteristics of the stiffened shell are usually difficult to be acquired, and there is neither an analytical solution for the complicated stiffeners configuration. Therefore, a Wave finite element method (FEM) based on the wave theory and finite element method, which can solve the dynamic response and band gap characteristics of casings with wide frequency band is presented. Taking the characteristics of the curvature into account, it is proposed for how to confirm the periodic boundaries of the shells. Moreover, the finite element model built by ANSYS is combined with MATLAB program, and the validity of Wave FEM is proved in shell with different boundaries including free-clamped boundary and free-free boundary. The results reveal that with the increase of stiffeners’ width, wider frequency range and larger attenuating ability appear in the vibration band gap. While with the increase of stiffeners’ thickness, neither the variety of the attenuating capability nor of the frequency range of band gaps is monotone. And the local resonance of stiffeners is obvious, the corresponding band gaps’ contribution to the whole system is little. Moreover, three typical configurations-hexagonal, square and triangular are considered. The configurations of stiffeners have distinct characteristics on the dispersion relation, if the weight problems are not taken into account, the square honeycomb is better than the others.