On the free vibrations of grid-stiffened composite cylindrical shells

A unified analytical approach is applied for investigating the vibrational behavior of grid-stiffened composite cylindrical shells considering the flexural behavior of the ribs. A smeared method is employed to superimpose the stiffness contribution of the stiffeners with those of the shell in order to obtain the equivalent stiffness parameters of the whole panel. The stiffeners are modeled as a beam and considered to support shear loads and bending moments in addition to the axial loads. Therefore, the corresponding stiffness terms are taken into consideration while obtaining the stiffness matrices due to the stiffeners. Theoretical formulations are based on first-order shear deformation shell theory, which includes the effects of transverse shear deformation and rotary inertia. The modal forms are assumed to have the axial dependency in the form of Fourier series whose derivatives are legitimized using Stokes' transformation. In order to validate the obtained results, a 3-D finite element model is also built using ABAQUS CAE software. Results obtained from two types of analyses are compared with each other, and good agreement has been achieved. Furthermore, the influence of variations in the shell thickness and changes of the boundary conditions on the shell frequencies is studied. The results obtained are novel and can be used as a benchmark for further studies.