Abstract
In the present paper, concept of a periodic structure is used to study the characteristics of the natural frequencies of a complete unstiffened cylindrical shell. A segment of the shell between two consecutive nodal points is chosen to be a periodic structural element. The present effort is to modify Mead and Bardell's approach to study the free vibration characteristics of unstiffened cylindrical shell. The Love-Timoshenko formulation for the strain energy is used in conjunction with Hamilton's principle to compute the natural propagation constants for two shell geometries and different circumferential nodal patterns employing Floquet's principle. The natural frequencies were obtained using Sengupta's method and were compared with those obtained from classical Arnold-Warburton's method. The results from the wave propagation method were found to compare identically with the classical methods, since both the methods lead to the exact solution of the same problem. Thus consideration of the shell segment between two consecutive nodal points as a periodic structure is validated. The variations of the phase constants at the lower bounding frequency for the first propagation band for different nodal patterns have been computed. The method is highly computationally efficient.