ANALYSIS OF ROTATING LAMINATED CYLINDRICAL-SHELLS BY DIFFERENT THIN SHELL THEORIES

The natural frequencies of the forward and backward modes of thin rotating laminated cylindrical shells are determined by using four common thin shell theories, namely Donnell's, Flugge's, Love's and Sanders'. The objective is to present a unified analysis, formulated with the use of tracers so that it can be reduced to any of the four shell theories by giving appropriate values to the tracers. For simplicity, results are presented only for the case of simply supported-simply supported boundary conditions, which can be satisfied by expressing the displacement fields in terms of the products of sine and cosine functions. Numerical results presented are the non-dimensional frequency parameters of the forward and backward travelling modes for rotating cylindrical shells and the non-dimensional frequency parameters for non-rotating cylindrical shells. The present analysis is verified by comparing the numerical results with those in the literature and very good agreement is obtained. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited