Free vibration analysis of ring-stiffened cylindrical shells using wave propagation approach

The wave propagation approach is used to analyze the free vibration of ring-stiffened cylindrical shell under initial hydrostatic pressure, based on Flügge classical thin shell theory and orthotropic method in this paper. The results obtained are compared with those available in other literature. It has been proved that, free vibration analysis using wave propagation approach with shear diaphragm–shear diaphragm (SD–SD) boundary conditions is absolutely equal to the traditional method. To evaluate the validity and accuracy of the wave propagation approach, an exact solution for arbitrary boundary conditions is also proposed in this paper. The comparisons between these two approaches are carried out for clamped–clamped (C–C) and clamped–shear diaphragm (C–SD) boundary conditions. The results show that wave propagation has high accuracy for long shell and large circumferential numbers.