Vibration of open cylindrical shells with stepped thickness variations

This paper presents the first-known exact solutions for vibration of open circular cylindrical shells with multiple stepwise thickness variations based on the Flügge thin shell theory. An open cylindrical shell is assumed to be simply supported along the two straight edges and the remaining two opposite curved edges may have any combination of edge support conditions. The shell is subdivided into segments at the locations of thickness variations. The state-space technique is adopted to derive the homogenous differential equations for a shell segment and the domain decomposition method is employed to impose the equilibrium and compatibility requirements along the interfaces of the shell segments. The correctness of the proposed method is checked against existing results in the open literature and results generated from finite element package ANSYS and excellent agreement is achieved. Several open shells with various combinations of end boundary conditions are studied by the proposed method.