Longitudinal oscillation of a rod with a variable cross section

Abstract

Variable cross-section rods are used in many parts and mechanisms. For example, conical rods are widely used in percussion mechanisms. The strength of such parts directly depends on the natural frequencies of longitudinal vibrations. The paper presents a method that allows numerically finding the natural frequencies of longitudinal vibrations of an elastic rod with a variable cross section. This method is based on representing the cross-sectional area as an exponential function of a polynomial of degree n. Based on this idea, it was possible to formulate the Sturm-Liouville problem with boundary conditions of the third kind. The linearly independent functions of the general solution have the form of a power series in the variables x and λ, as a result of which the order of the characteristic equation depends on the choice of the number of terms in the series. The presented approach differs from the works of other authors both in the formulation and in the solution method. In the work, a rod with a rigidly fixed left end is considered, fixing on the right end can be either free, or elastic or rigid. The first three natural frequencies for various cross-sectional profiles are given. From the analysis of the numerical results it follows that in a rigidly fixed rod with thinning in the middle part, the first natural frequency is noticeably higher than that of a conical rod. It is shown that with an increase in the rigidity of fixation at the right end, the natural frequencies increase for all cross section profiles. The results of the study can be used to solve inverse problems of restoring the cross-sectional profile from a finite set of natural frequencies.