Vibration of continuous systems with compliant boundaries

A theoretical study of two types of continuous systems with a general form of compliant boundary conditions is presented. The systems considered are elastic beams and circular plates with elastic damped edge constraints. Beam studies are restricted to those with identical boundary conditions at each end. The method of solution consists of formulating the edge condition of the system in terms of the impedance of the compliant boundary material and of using classical solution techniques to solve the equations of motion. The result of matching the boundary conditions of the system with constraining conditions is the system frequency equation in terms of the constraint impedances.A discussion is presented giving the influence of the compliant material on the vibration of the structure. The models give numerically the effect of elasticity and damping of the supports on the resonant frequencies of the systems. Parameters are obtained which indicate when one may assume simply supported or clamped boundaries for the actual case of elastic damped constraints without introducing large errors in the natural frequencies.