ABSTRACT
The concepts of stiffness and natural frequency, rst introduced in Chapter 1, are being continued here. For a simple oscillator, the equation of motion is the rst-order differential equation, and the determination of natural frequency is trivial. When a body has a continuous mass distribution, the description of motion is accomplished by partial differential equations. In this chapter, essentially the rst natural frequency is of interest, which makes the task relatively simple. Much of the material relates to frequencies of very basic elements, but a few methods combining those are also provided, so that more complex arrangements can be approximated.
