Yavari - Department of Mechanical Engineering, Engineering School, Shiraz University
Kadivar - Department of Mechanical Engineering, Engineering School, Shiraz University

Storage tanks and cylindrical shells containing fluid are widely used as structural components in various applications. The aim of this paper is computing and evaluating the vibration behavior of a partially fluidfilled laminated composite shell. The analyses involve three dimensional finite element models performed by ABAQUS 6.6-1 code to evaluate the natural frequencies and modes of vibration of the shell and investigate the effects of contained fluid height on the natural frequencies and modes of vibration. Results are determined for isotropic shell first and attempts are made to validate the model with previous experiments. Then, the problem is solved for partially fluid-filled laminated composite shell and natural frequencies and modes of vibration are extracted. The contained fluid affects the vibration behavior of the whole problem. It is shown that the fluid effect on the shell is significant and ignorance of the fluid effect will lead to large errors in vibration analysis of fluid-filled shells.

finite element method, coupled natural frequencies, acoustic-structure interaction, thin-walled cylindrical shell