Local adaptive differential quadrature for free vibration analysis of cylindrical shells with various boundary conditions

This paper presents the formulation and numerical analysis of circular cylindrical shells by the local adaptive differential quadrature method (LaDQM), which employs both localized interpolating basis functions and exterior grid points for boundary treatments. The governing equations of motion are formulated using the Goldenveizer–Novozhilov shell theory. Appropriate management of exterior grid points is presented to couple the discretized boundary conditions with the governing differential equations instead of using the interior points. The use of compactly supported interpolating basis functions leads to banded and well-conditioned matrices, and thus, enables large-scale computations. The treatment of boundary conditions with exterior grid points avoids spurious eigenvalues. Detailed formulations are presented for the treatment of various shell boundary conditions. Convergence and comparison studies against existing solutions in the literature are carried out to examine the efficiency and reliability of the present approach. It is found that accurate natural frequencies can be obtained by using a small number of grid points with exterior points to accommodate the boundary conditions.