Free vibration of composite cylindrical shells with orthogonal stiffeners

This paper proposes theoretical and numerical approaches to scrutinize the free vibration of orthogonal stiffened cylindrical shells. According to K´arman-Donnell shell theory, the total energy of the stiffened cylindrical shells is derived. Based on the principle of minimum potential energy, the eigenfunction related to the frequency is established and solved by developing a Matlab program. Analytical solutions of the natural frequency for free vibraion of the stiffened cylindrical shells are calculated and are verified against the finite element results from ABAQUS software. On account of the observations from the parametric study, an optimization scheme of the stiffeners is proposed.