FREE VIBRATION ANALYSIS OF ROTATING FLEXIBLE BEAMS BY USING THE FOURIER p-VERSION OF THE FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

Abstract

A p-version of the finite element method is applied to free vibration analysis of rotating beams in conjunction with the modeling dynamic method using the arc-length stretch deformation. In this study the flexible and the rigid body degrees of freedom (d.o.f.) are supposedly uncoupled, the linear equations of motion are derived for flapwise and chordwise bending with the integration of the gyroscopic effect. The hybrid displacements are expressed as the combination of the in-plane and out-of-plane shape functions. These are formulated in terms of linear and cubic polynomial functions used generally in FEM in addition to a variable number of trigonometric shape functions which represent the internal d.o.f. for the rotating flexible beams. The convergence properties of the rotating beam Fourier p-element and the influence of angular speed, boundary conditions and slenderness ratio on the dynamic response are studied. It is shown that using this element the order of the resulting matrices in the FEM is considerably reduced leading to a significant decrease in computational effort.