Stochastic Natural Vibration Analyses of Free-Form Shells

Abstract

This work investigates the natural vibration characteristics of free-form shells when considering the influence of uncertainties, including initial geometric imperfection, shell thickness deviation, and elastic modulus deviation. Herein, free-form shell models are generated while using a self-coded optimization algorithm. The Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) method is used to draw the samplings of uncertainties with respect to their stochastic probability models. ANSYS finite element (FE) software is adopted to analyze the natural vibration characteristics and compute the natural frequencies. The mean values, standard deviations, and cumulative distributions functions (CDFs) of the first three natural frequencies are obtained. The partial correlation coefficient is adopted to rank the significances of uncertainty factors. The study reveals that, for the free-form shells that were investigated in this study, the natural frequencies is a random quantity with a normal distribution; elastic modulus deviation imposes the greatest effect on natural frequencies; shell thickness ranks the second; geometrical imperfection ranks the last, with a much lower weight than the other two factors, which illustrates that the shape of the studied free-form shells is robust in term of natural vibration characteristics; when the supported edges are fixed during the shape optimization, the stochastic characteristics do not significantly change during the shape optimization process.