Free vibration of curvilinearly stiffened shallow shells

The free vibration of curvilinearly stiffened shallow shells is investigated by the Ritz method. Based on the first-order shear deformation shell theory and three-dimensional (3D) curved beam theory, the strain and kinetic energies of the stiffened shells are introduced. The stiffener can be placed anywhere within the shell, without the need for having the stiffener and shell element nodes coincide. Numerical results with different geometrical shells and boundary conditions and different stiffener locations and curvatures are analyzed to verify the feasibility of the presented Ritz method for solving the problems. The results show good agreement with those using other methods, e.g., using a converged set of results obtained by NASTRAN.