Doubly curved shell vibration using coupled finite element method

In this study, we present an efficient coupled method for the doubly curved shell vibration modeling. The proposed model is based on the coupling of the hierarchical p-finite element method and the standard h-finite element method. The helements define the curved boundaries of the shell while the p-elements describe the interior domain. The connectivity between the two discretized domains is assured by the least square method. In comparison to conventional models, the coupled model captures accurately the shell curvilinear boundary with high computational efficiency and small number of elements. The proposed model is validated against both analytical solution and numerical simulation. Doubly curved shell structures with different cutouts are presented to show the robustness, applicability and computational convenience of the proposed coupled approach for complex shell geometries.