The free vibration characteristics of a rotating tapered Rayleigh beam is analysed in this study. First, the strain-displacement relationship for the rotating beam is formulated and used to derive the kinetic and strain energies in explicit analytical form. Second, Hamilton’s variational principle is used to derive the governing differential equation of motion and the associated boundary conditions. Third, the Differential Transformation Method (DTM) is applied to reduce the governing differential equations of motion and the boundary conditions to a set of algebraic equations from which the frequency equation is derived. Next, a numerical algorithm implemented in the software package Mathematica is used to compute the natural frequencies of vibration for a few paired combinations of clamped, pinned and free end conditions of the beam. Also, the variation of the natural frequencies of vibration with respect to variations in the rotational speed, hub radius, taper ratio and the slenderness ratio is studied. The results obtained from the Bresse-Rayleigh theory are compared with results obtained from the Bernoulli-Euler and Timoshenko theories to demonstrate the accuracy and relevance of their application.
