A unified spectro-geometric-Ritz solution for free vibration analysis of conical–cylindrical–spherical shell combination with arbitrary boundary conditions

In the present article, a spectro-geometric-Ritz solution for free vibration analysis of conical–cylindrical–spherical shell combinations with arbitrary boundary conditions is presented. The classical theory of small displacements of thin shells is employed to formulate the theoretical model. The admissible functions of each shell components are described as a combination of a two-dimensional (2-D) Fourier cosine series and auxiliary functions. As an innovative point of this work, the auxiliary functions are introduced to accelerate the convergence of the series representations and eliminate all the relevant discontinuities with the displacement and its derivatives at the boundaries and the junction between the shell components. The artificial spring technique is adopted here to model the boundary condition and coupling condition, respectively. All the expansion coefficients are considered as the generalized coordinates and determined by Ritz procedure. Convergence and comparison studies for both open and closed conical–cylindrical–spherical shells with arbitrary boundary conditions are carried out to verify the reliability and accuracy of the present solutions. Some selected mode shapes are illustrated to enhance the understanding of the research topic. It is found the present method exhibits stable and rapid convergence characteristics, and the present results, including the natural frequencies and the mode shapes, agree closely with those solutions obtained from the finite element analyses and results in the literature. The effects of the geometrical dimensions of the shell combinations on the natural frequencies are also investigated.