Free Vibrations of Reinforced Elastic Shells

A technique is presented for the analysis of a wide class of reinforced, elastic structures undergoing free vibrations while subject to constraints imposed by the reinforcing elements. The technique consists of replacing the constrained structure by an equivalent model, a structure without reinforcing elements, undergoing free vibrations while subject to a loading system which consists of the structure-reinforcing element interaction forces. These forces are introduced as displacement-dependent loads, whose magnitudes reflect the elastic and inertial properties of the reinforcing elements. The displacements of the constrained body are expanded in terms of the normal modes of the unconstrained body. This approach leads to a set of manageable governing equations describing the behavior of the reinforced body exactly. A solution to these equations may then be obtained to any desired degree of accuracy. The technique is illustrated by computations performed for the case of a ring reinforced, circular cylindrical shell.