A Domain Decomposition Method for Vibration Analysis of Conical Shells With Uniform and Stepped Thickness

An efficient domain decomposition method is proposed to study the free and forced vibrations of stepped conical shells (SCSs) with arbitrary number of step variations. Conical shells with uniform thickness are treated as special cases of the SCSs. Multilevel partition hierarchy, viz., SCS, shell segment and shell domain, is adopted to accommodate the computing requirement of high-order vibration modes and responses. The interface continuity constraints on common boundaries and geometrical boundaries are incorporated into the system potential functional by means of a modified variational principle and least-squares weighted residual method. Double mixed series, i.e., the Fourier series and Chebyshev orthogonal polynomials, are adopted as admissible displacement functions for each shell domain. To test the convergence, efficiency and accuracy of the present method, free and forced vibrations of uniform thickness conical shells and SCSs are examined under various combinations of classical and nonclassical boundary conditions. The numerical results obtained from the proposed method show good agreement with previously published results and those from the finite element program ANSYS. The computational advantage of the approach can be exploited to gather useful and rapid information about the effects of geometry and boundary conditions on the vibrations of the uniform and stepped conical shells.