Abstract
This study proposes an optimization method to deal with free vibration of shallow shells with generally curved surfaces expressed in terms of cubic polynomial functions. Such shell structures with variable curvature are recently found in automobile and other design-oriented structural applications. In the first example, the fundamental frequency is maximized as the object function with respect to the curvature. The second example is given to maximize the difference of the lowest two frequencies, and the third one is to find the best curvature design to fit to any desired vibration frequency within the physically possible range. The optimization technique employed here is a part of functions in ADS program that is based on mathematical programming.
