Enhanced free vibration analysis of composite wing-box structures by one-dimensional Component-wise and dynamic stiffness formulations

Free vibration analysis is an important aspect of aeronautical engineering. The availability of enhanced models for accurate modal analysis is therefore of primary interest. This work deals with advanced 1D formulations able to foresee higher-order phenomena, such as elastic bending/shear coupling, restrained torsional warping and 3D strain effects. The proposed beam models are developed in the framework of the Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF), whose hierarchical capability allows the analyst to implement automatically refined models with arbitrarily rich kinematics. The capabilities of the resulting 1D theories are assessed by both weak- and strong-form solutions and the results from free vibration analyses of wing-like composite structures are compared to those from the literature, experiments and commercial FEM software.