Abstract: | Modal analysis is commonly performed in a vehicle development process to assess dynamic responses of structure designs. This paper presents an adaptive quadrilateral refinement process for modal analysis of elastic shells based upon a posteriori error estimation in natural frequencies. The process provides engineers with an estimation of their modal analysis quality and an effective adaptive refinement tool for quadrilateral meshes. The effectiveness of the process is demonstrated on the eigenvalue analyses of two numerical examples, a shock tower cap and a roof structure. It shows that the solution error in the frequency of interest is effectively reduced through the adaptive refinement process, and the resulting frequency of interest converges to the solution of a very fine model. |