A stiffness equation transfer method for natural frequencies of structures

A stiffness equation transfer method is proposed for obtaining vibration frequencies of structures. This method is an extension of the finite element-transfer matrix (FE-TM) method. In the present method, the transfer of state vectors from left to right in the ordinary FE-TM method is changed into the transfer of stiffness equations of every section from left to right. This method reduces the propagation of round-off errors produced in the ordinary transfer matrix method. Furthermore, the drawback that the number of degrees of freedom on the left boundary must be the same as that on the right boundary in the ordinary FE-TM method, is now avoided. Besides, this method finds out the values of the frequency by Newton-Raphson iteration method, so no plotting of the value of the determinant versus assumed frequency is necessary. An IFETM—W program based on this method for use on an IBM PC586 microcomputer is developed. Finally, numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy as well as the potential of the proposed method for free vibration analysis of structures.