Free vibration analysis of deep doubly curved sandwich panels

This paper presents the free vibration analysis of doubly curved open deep sandwich shells made of thin outer layers and a relatively thick core. The outer layers are assumed to be made of high strength and high density mater ial, The core is a low strength low density material. The Rayleigh-Ritz met hod, in which the displacement fields are defined by Bezier surface patches , is used to obtain the natural frequencies. The formulation procedure is d eveloped for the analysis of open panels circumscribed by four curvilinear edges. Numerical results are obtained for circular cylindrical and spherica l sandwich panels with the boundary conditions given by: one curved edge cl amped and the remaining three edges free as well as two opposite edges clam ped and the other two completely free, (C) 1999 Civil-Comp Ltd and Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.