Flexural and axial vibration analysis of beams with different support conditions using artificial neural networks

An artificial neural network (ANN) application is presented for flexural and axial vibration analysis of elastic beams with various support conditions. The first three natural frequencies of beams are obtained using multi layer neural network based back-propagation error learning algorithm. The natural frequencies of beams are calculated for six different boundary conditions via direct solution of governing differential equations of beams and Rayleigh's approximate method. The training of the network has been made using these data only flexural vibration case. The trained neural network, however, had been tested for cantilever beam (C-F), and both end free (F-F) in case the axial vibration, and clamped-clamped (CC), and Guided-Pinned (G-P) support condition in case the flexural vibrations which were not included in the training set. The results found by using artificial neural network are sufficiently close to the theoretical results. It has been demonstrated that the artificial neural network approach applied in this study is highly successful for the purposes of free vibration analysis of elastic beams.