In order to study the free vibration of simply supported circular cylindrical shells, a semi-analytical procedure is discussed in detail. In this technique, beam function is used as an approximation for simply supported boundary conditions. A literature review reveals that beam functions are used extensively in predicting natural frequencies of shells. Since this method does not involve with boundary condition equations, there is no need to deal with intense calculations. Hence, it is important to check the accuracy of this approximate technique. So this method was applied to ten different shell theories: 1) Donnell-Mushtari, 2) Love-Timoshenko, 3) Arnold-Warburton, 4) Houghton-Johns, 5) Flugge-Byrne-Lur’ye, 6) Reissner-Naghdi-Berry, 7) Sanders, 8) Vlasov, 9) Kennard-Simplified and 10) Soedel. The approximate procedure was compared favorably with experimental results. Finally, variations and influences of length, radius and thickness were studied on amplitude ratios.
