2-D solution for free vibrations of parabolic shells using generalized differential quadrature method

The Generalized Differential Quadrature (GDQ) procedure is developed for the free vibration analysis of complete parabolic shells of revolution and parabolic shell panels. The First-order Shear Deformation Theory (FSDT) is used to analyze the above moderately thick structural elements. The treatment is conducted within the theory of linear elasticity, when the material behaviour is assumed to be homogeneous and isotropic. The governing equations of motion, written in terms of internal resultants, are expressed as functions of five kinematic parameters, by using the constitutive and kinematic relationships. The solution is given in terms of generalized displacement components of the points lying on the middle surface of the shell. The discretization of the system by means of the Differential Quadrature (DQ) technique leads to a standard linear eigenvalue problem, where two independent variables are involved. The results are obtained taking the meridional and circumferential co-ordinates into account, without using the Fourier modal expansion methodology. Several examples of parabolic shell elements are presented to illustrate the validity and the accuracy of GDQ method. Numerical solutions are compared with the ones obtained using commercial programs such as Abaqus, Ansys, Femap/Nastran, Straus, Pro/Mechanica. Very good agreement is observed. Furthermore, the convergence rate of natural frequencies is shown to be very fast and the stability of the numerical methodology is very good. The accuracy of the method is sensitive to the number of sampling points used, to their distribution and to the boundary conditions. Different typologies of non-uniform grid point distributions are considered. The effect of the distribution choice of sampling points on the accuracy of GDQ solution is investigated. New numerical results are presented.