Revisited on the Free Vibration of a Cantilever Beam with an Asymmetrically Attached Tip Mass

Cantilever with an asymmetrically attached tip mass arises in many engineering applications. Both the traditional method of separation of variables and the method of Laplace transform are employed in the present paper to solve the eigenvalue problem of the free vibration of such structures, and the effect of the eccentric distance along the vertical direction and the length direction of the tip mass is considered here. For the traditional method of separation of variables, tip mass only affects to the boundary conditions, and the eigenvalue problem of the free vibration is solved based on the nonhomogeneous boundary conditions. For the method of Laplace transform, the effect of the tip mass is introduced in the governing equation with the Dirac function, and the eigenvalue problem then can be solved through Laplace transform with homogeneous boundary conditions. The computed results with these two methods are compared well with the numerical solution obtained by finite element method and approximate analytical solutions, and the effect of tip mass dimensions on the natural frequencies and corresponding mode shapes is also given.