“…In the case of large vibration amplitudes, the non-linear behaviour of the #at plates and straight bars is usually of the hardening type (i.e., frequency increasing with vibration amplitude). For shells, it may be either hardening [13,40,41,46,47,48, 72}83], softening [13,14,25,29,74,76,82, 84}90], or initial softening followed by hardening [74,82,89,90]. The type of non-linearity of cylindrical shells depends on the shell geometrical characteristics, the mode wave numbers, the boundary conditions and, the amplitude of vibration.…”