Existence of axisymmetric modes of thin cylindrical shells with axial displacement restraint

A necessary and sufficient condition is derived for the existence of the axisymmetric mode of cylindrical shells with a radial displacement having one half wave along the axis and axial displacement restrained at both ends. The condition is purely geometric and consists of an upper bound on the mean radius of thickness ratio for a given fixed value of the length to mean radius ratio, above which the mode with one half wave in radial displacement along the axis ceases to exist. The proof is based on enforcing two basic lemmas concerned with the simplicity of the eigenvalues of the shell and the uniform ordering of these eigenvalues with the number of nodes of their corresponding radial displacement eigenfunctions.