1D Hierarchical Ritz- and 2D GDQ-Based Approaches for the Mechanical Modeling of Thin-Walled Composite Structures

In the last decades, thin-walled composite structures with different geometries have been largely applied in many engineering applications because of their optimal strength-to-weight ratio. In a context where advanced numerical methods are required for an accurate estimation of their structural behaviour, especially when innovative constituents and materials are involved, we apply, in the present work, two different numerical approaches to treat the vibration response of some selected structural components with different shapes. In detail, we employ the 1D-Ritz formulation with 3D capabilities [1-3] and 2D Generalized Differential Quadrature (GDQ) method [4-6] both in the strong and weak form, whose results are compared to the ones based on a classical 3D finite element formulation. Thus, a systematic investigation is performed to study the sensitivity of the natural frequencies to different input parameters, namely, the boundary conditions, the length-to-thickness ratio, as well as different material and geometrical properties. The main advantages of the proposed solution techniques, are discussed comparatively, both in terms of convergence and accuracy, for each case study here analysed.