Optimum Design of Vibrating Cantilevers：A Classical Problem Revisited.pdfVIP

JOURNAL OF OPTIMIZATION THEORY AND APPLICATIONS: Vol. 84, No. 3, pp. 635-652, MARCH 1995 Optimum Design of Vibrating Cantilevers: A Classical Problem Revisited I F. Y. W A N G 2 Communicated by L. Meirovitch Abstract. Optimum design of vibrating cantilevers is a classical prob- lem widely used in the literature and textbooks in structural optimiza- tion. The problem, originally formulated and solved by Karihaloo and Niordson (Ref. 5), was to find the optimal beam shape that will maximize the fundamental vibration frequency of a cantilever. Upon reexamination of the problem, it has been found that the original analysis and solution procedure can be simplified and improved sub- stantially. Specifically, the time-consuming inner loop devised for solv- ing the Lagrange multiplier in the original work has been proved to be totally unnecessary and thus should not be considered in the problem solution. This conclusion has ted to a new set of simplified equations for the construction of iteration schemes. New asymptotic expressions for the optimum design solution have been obtained and verified by numerical results. Numerical analysis has shown a significant improve- ment in convergence rate by the proposed new procedure. Also some obvious numerical errors in the original paper have been identified and corrected. Key Words. Cantilever beams, flexible manipulators, optimum design, fundamental frequency, successive iterat