Free Vibration Characteristics of Moderately Thick Spherical Shell with General Boundary Conditions Based on Ritz Method

In this paper, the Ritz method is adopted to investigate the vibration characteristics of isotropic moderately thick annular spherical shell with general boundary conditions. The energy expressions of the annular spherical shell were established based on the first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT). The spring stiffness method is introduced to guarantee continuity and simulate various boundary conditions on the basis of the domain decomposition method. Under the current framework, the displacement admissible function along axial direction and circumferential direction of the shell structure are, respectively, expanded as the unified Jacobi polynomials and Fourier series. The final solutions can be obtained according to the Ritz method. The validity of the proposed method is proved by comparing the results of the same condition with those obtained by the finite element method (FEM) and published literatures. The results show that the current method has fast convergence and delightful accuracy through the comparative study. On this basis, the vibration characteristics of isotropic moderately thick annular spherical shell are further studied by a series of numerical examples.