Natural frequencies of a vibrating repaired panel in an ocean structure

Abstract

The present work arose from the need of repairing steel plates badly damaged by corrosion in a portion of the structural element of the naval vehicle. The possibility of removing the portion and replacing it by a patch of a composite material was considered. Its dynamic behavior is altered by the introduction of the patch and the prediction of its new behavior is of great interest in many situations. This condition would appear in other real-life situations like as a localized orthotropic effect caused in the panel by a welding procedure or a metallurgical process. The first four natural frequency coefficients of the composite repaired panel with different types of boundary conditions are determined by means of a variational approach. The displacement function is approximated making use of complete sets of beam functions. The eigenvalues have been computed from (225×225) secular determinants. An independent solution is obtained using the finite element method and a reasonably good agreement with the analytical solution is encountered. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.