Experimental investigation of dynamic behaviour of pre-compressed circular cylindrical shell

Circular cylindrical shells are very efficient structures that have many applications and plays as key elements in several engineering fields. Shells usually exhibit a complicated dynamic behaviours because the curvature will effectively couple the flexural and in-plane deformations together as the three displacement fields simultaneously appear in each of the governing partial differential equations and boundary conditions. Therefore, it is understandable that the axial constraints can have direct effects on a predominantly radial modes. For instance, it has been shown that the natural frequencies for the circumferential modes of a simply supported shell can be noticeably modified by the constraints applied in the axial direction. In this paper the results of experimental tests on pre-compressed circular cylindrical shell will be presented: different combinations of preload and harmonic external axial load have been tested but for brevity only few results are shown.