• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.19 no.1 s.71
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• pp.55-62
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• 2006

The natural frequency of a beam plays a critical role in the dynamic analysis of beams. Especially it is a complicated and difficult task to analyse the natural frequency of a stepped beam with an irregularly varying section. The lumped mass methods, multi-degree of freedom analyses, are mainly used for the analysis of this kind of stepped beams. The accuracy of these methods are determined by the number of the partitions of elements, the number of the iterations in calculation, and the accuracy of assumed mode shapes. This study presents a method of transformation from symmetrically stepped beams to an equivalent beam and a method of the eigenvalue analysis. Appropriateness and utility of this method are demonstrated by comparing examples from other literatures and various models.