Abstract: The finite element equations of the traveling wave vibration of rotating shells with the effects of the Coriolis and centrifugal force are established in this paper.Because of the effect of Coriolis force,the frequencies of forward and backward wave are different even under the rotating coordinate system.This is the main difference between rotating shells and disks.The Coriolis and centrifugal stiffness matrixes are formed by modifying the lump mass matrix and introduced into finite element program MSC/NASTRAN by DMAP (Direct Matrix Abstraction Program).To validate the present analysis,comparisons are made with existing results for a rotating shell and good agreement is obtained.