Fundamental frequency of a doubly connected membrane: a modified perturbation method

The fundamental frequency of a membrane is the square root ofthe lowest eigenvalue of the negative Laplace operator withDirichlet boundary conditions. A doubly connected membrane withthe inner region of vanishing maximal dimension 2c is consideredin this paper. A modified perturbation method is developed toprovide an asymptotic expansion (c 0) for the fundamental frequencyof the membrane. The first three order terms of the asymptoticexpansion for the fundamental frequency of a doubly connectedmembrane with the circular inner region are derived explicitly.The results are compared with the exact solutions and the approximationsdetermined by other investigators. The error of the perturbationcalculations compared with the exact values is less than 1%as c is less than or equal to 0·25 and is less than 4%as c is less than or equal to 0·35.