Free vibrations of laminated composite shells with uniformly distributed attached mass using higher order shell theory including stiffness effect

In this paper, free vibrations of a cross-ply composite shell with or without a uniformly distributed attached mass are analyzed using higher order shell theory. The results of free vibrations without distributed attached mass are validated by previous literatures. The stiffness effect of this distributed attached mass are also considered and compared with those well-known published results in which this effect is ignored. Various results for composite shells under a variety of conditions such as variations in the thickness of the shell, variation in the thickness of the distributed attached mass, variation in the radii of curvatures and various elasticity moduli are presented in this paper. In some cases, to verify the novel results, first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) is also used. In this paper, parameters which influence the natural frequencies of the shells with attached mass including the stiffness of the mass are investigated. Parameters which are investigated in this paper are thickness of the shell, thickness of the distributed attached mass, elasticity moduli of the distributed attached mass and radius of curvatures of shells. Increasing the thickness or elasticity moduli of the distributed attached mass will increase the fundamental natural frequency of the shell. The effect of the stiffness of the distributed attached mass is decreased by decreasing the radii of curvatures or increasing the thickness of the shells.

► We examined free vibration of a cross-ply composite shell with or without a uniformly distributed attached mass.
► Null points in which adding an attached mass does not affect the fundamental natural frequency of the system are found.
► Thickening the attached mass and fixing the first mass inertia, the stiffness and the natural frequency of the system is increased.
► Radius of curvatures is a parameter which influenced the main system natural frequency.