LAUSR

For the free vibration of composite beams and non-uniform beams we propose a new upper bound theory to approximate the first few natural frequencies. The Rayleigh quotient is expressed in terms of boundary functions, instead of that in terms of eigenfunctions. The boundary function satisfies all boundary conditions of the given beam, and is at least the fourth-order polynomial with leading coefficient to be one. We prove that the maximality of the Rayleigh quotient in the space of the kth order boundary functions is equivalent to the orthogonality of the kth order boundary function to lower order optimal boundary functions. Hence, we can easily find the kth order natural frequency through an orthogonalization technique provided. When the first three natural frequencies are compared with the exact or numerically found ones, good results are obtained, which confirm the applicability of the present upper bound theory. We address the inverse problems of composite beam equations, where we use the orthogonal system of boundary functions as bases to expand the unknown functions and derive linear algebraic equations to determine the expansion coefficients. As a consequence, we can fast and accurately estimate the unknown rigidity function and planar inertial function with the help of the first three natural frequencies, and the supplemented measured data of recovered function on two boundaries. The robustness of the present inversion methods is demonstrated by numerical examples.