A numerical assembly technique for free vibration of plane frames using a shifted and deflated Newton method

A semi-analytic method, namely the Numerical Assembly Technique (NAT) is extended to compute natural frequencies of arbitrary planar frame structures. The frame structure is systematically defined by a set of nodes, beams, bearings, springs, and external loads and the corresponding boundary and interface conditions are formulated. We consider the Timoshenko-Ehrenfest beam theory and take axial, bending and shear deformations as well as linear and rotational inertia into account. Since we use the exact solutions of the governing differential equations in the NAT, the accuracy of the results is independent from the spatial discretization. However, the resulting eigenvalue problem is non-linear and requires a numerical algorithm to solve. We consider three different representations of exact homogeneous solutions and study the numerical stability of the resulting system matrix. To solve for the eigenvalues we propose a Newton method enhanced with a shifted deflation algorithm. The stability and the efficiency of this approach is illustrated in numerical examples.