Noncircular Cylinder Vibration by Multilocal Method

A modified multilocal difference scheme is presented for the free vibration analysis of nonhomogeneous orthotropic noncircular cylindrical shells with simply supported curved edges. The problem is formulated in terms of 10 first-order ordinary differential equations and in the finite-difference discretization two interlacing grids are used for the different fundamental unknowns in such a way as to reduce both the local discretization error and the bandwidth of the resulting finite-difference field equations. Numerical studies are presented for the effects of reducing the interior and boundary discretization errors and of mesh refinement on the accuracy and convergence of solutions. It is shown that the proposed scheme, in addition to a number of other advantages, leads to more accurate results than those obtained by other multilocal and ordinary difference schemes reported here-to-fore in the literature.