A unified formulation for vibration analysis of open cylindrical shells coupled with annular sector plates under general boundary and coupling conditions

A unified formulation for vibration analysis of coupled open cylindrical shell and annular sector plate system with general boundary and coupling conditions is presented in this study by using a modified Fourier-Ritz method. Under the framework, each of the displacements of the open cylindrical shell and the annular sector plate, regardless of boundary and coupling conditions, is expanded as a two-dimensional (2-D) Fourier cosine series supplemented with closed-form auxiliary functions introduced to remove the potential discontinuities at the junction and accelerate the convergence of the series expansion. Since the displacement fields are constructed adequately smooth throughout the entire solution domain, an exact solution is obtained based on the Rayleigh-Ritz procedure by using the energy functions of the coupled system. The arbitrary coupling position and included angle of the open cylindrical shell-annular sector plate structure considered in the theoretical formulation make the present method more general. The convergence and accuracy of the present method are tested and validated by a number of numerical examples for open cylindrical shell-annular sector plate structure with various boundary restraints and general elastic coupling conditions. Some new results are presented to provide useful information for future researchers.