Abstract
The effects of boundary conditions on vibration characteristics for the ring stiffered composite cylindrical shells are investigated by theoretical and experimental method. In the theoretical procedure, the Love's thin shell theory combined with the discrete stiffener theory to consider the ring stiffening effect are adopted to derive the frequency equation. In experiment, the impact exciting method is used to obtain the vibraton results. Five different boundary conditions: clamped-clamped, simply supported-simply supported, free-free, clamped-free, clamped-simply supported are considered in this study.