Research Article Free Vibration Characteristic of Multilevel Beam Based on Transfer Matrix Method of Linear Multibody Systems

License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In this paper, an approach based on transfermatrixmethod of linearmultibody systems (MS-TMM) is developed to analyze the free vibration of a multilevel beam, coupled by spring/dashpot systems attached to them in-span.The Euler-Bernoulli model is used for the transverse vibration of the beams, and the spring/dashpot system represents a simplified model of a viscoelastic material. MS-TMM reduces the dynamic problem to an overall transfer equation which only involves boundary state vectors.The state vectors at the boundaries are composed of displacements, rotation angles, bending moments, and shear forces, which are partly known and partly unknown, and end up with reduced overall transfer matrix. Nontrivial solution requires the coefficient matrix to be singular to yield the required natural frequencies. This paper implements two novel algorithms based on the methodology by reducing the zero search of the reduced overall transfer matrix’s determinate to a minimization problem and demonstrates a simple and robust algorithm being much more efficient than direct enumeration. The proposal method is easy to formulate, systematic to apply, and simple to code and can be extended to complex structures with any boundary conditions. Numerical results are presented to show the validity of the proposal method against the published literature. 1