A remarkable nature of the effect of boundary conditions on closed-form solutions for vibrating inhomogeneous Bernoulli–Euler beams

In this paper three sets of boundary conditions are considered for reconstructing the stiffness of the inhomogeneous Bernoulli–Euler beams. The essence of the paper consists in postulating the mode shape of the vibrating beam as a static deflection of associated uniform, homogeneous beam. This unconventional way of problem formulation turns out to lead to series of new closed-form solutions. For each combination of the boundary conditions several cases of the inertial coefficients are considered. All exact solutions for natural frequencies are represented as rational expressions of the involved coefficients. Solutions are written in terms of two positive integers: `mʹ representing the degree of the polynomial in the inertial term and `nʹ indicating power in the postulated mode shape. A remarkable conclusion is reached: For specified `mʹ and `nʹ, the natural frequencies of the inhomogeneous beams with different boundary conditions coalesce. This remarkable nature does not imply that these beams share the same frequencies. In fact, these are different beams for each set of boundary conditions the expression for the stiffness is different. The paper should be considered as a first step towards analysis of uncertainty, inherently present in structures.