Abstract
Stepped beams constitute an important class of engineering structures whose vibration response has been widely studied. Many of the existing methods for studying stepped beams manifest serious numerical difficulties as the number of segments or the frequency of excitation increase. In this article, we focus on the transfer matrix method (TMM), which provides a simple and elegant formulation for multistep beams. The main idea in the TMM is to model each step in the beam as a uniform element whose vibration configurations are spanned by the segment’s local eigenfunctions. Utilizing these local expressions, the boundary conditions at the ends of the multistep beam as well as the continuity and compatibility conditions across each step are used to obtain the nonlinear eigenvalue problem. Also, and perhaps more importantly, we provide a reformulation for multistep Euler–Bernoulli beams that avoids much of the numerical singularity problems that have plagued most of the earlier efforts. When this reformulation is extended to multisegment Timoshenko beams, the numerical difficulties appear to be mitigated, but not solved.
