SIMILARITY SOLUTIONS AND CONSERVATION LAWS FOR THE BEAM EQUATIONS: A COMPLETE STUDY

Abstract

We study the similarity solutions and we determine the conservation laws of the various forms of beam equation, such as, Euler-Bernoulli, Rayleigh and Timoshenko-Prescott. The travelling-wave reduction leads to solvable fourth-order odes for all the forms. In addition, the reduction based on the scaling symmetry for the Euler-Bernoulli form leads to certain odes for which there exists zero symmetries. Therefore, we conduct the singularity analysis to ascertain the integrability. We study two reduced odes of order second and third. The reduced second-order ode is a perturbed form of Painleve-Ince equation, which is integrable and the third-order ode falls into the category of equations studied by Chazy, Bureau and Cosgrove. Moreover, we derived the symmetries and its corresponding reductions and conservation laws for the forced form of the above mentioned beam forms. The Lie Algebra is mentioned explicitly for all the cases.