Wave motion in thin-walled structures

The characterization of propagation constants of realistic thin-walled structures with any cross-section is studied in this paper. A propagative approach is proposed in order to extract propagation parameters. Specifically, by using an existing finite element model, the formulation provides an effective way to calculate the dispersion curves of realistic thin-walled structures. Some numerical results are presented to show that the described method can be applied to simple laboratory structures (cylinders, plate box structures) and typical automotive hollow structures.