A vast amount of published work can be found in the field of beam vibrations dealing with analytical and numerical techniques. This paper deals with analysis of the nonlinear free vibrations of beams. The problem considered represents the governing equation of the nonlinear, large amplitude free vibrations of tapered beams. A new implementation of the ancient Chinese method called the Max-Min Approach (MMA) and Homotopy Perturbation Method (HPM) are presented to obtain natural frequency and corresponding displacement of tapered beams. The effect of vibration amplitude on the non-linear frequency is discussed. In the end to illustrate the effectiveness and convenience of the MMA and HPM, the obtained results are compared with the exact ones and shown in graphs and in tables. Those approaches are very effective and simple and with only one iteration leads to high accuracy of the solutions. It is predicted that those methods can be found wide application in engineering problems, as indicated in this paper.
large amplitude free vibrations; analytical solution; tapered beam; Homotopy Perturbation Method (HPM); Max-Min Approach (MMA)
