Dynamic Characteristics Determination of Viscoelastic Sandwich Beam using Finite Element Method

Abstract

With the aim of reducing the various structural vibrations, the numerical methods have been developed with the structural damping capacity. The use of passive control in viscoelastic materials has been proven too much of effective to all the methods. The reason being the ability of the materials to exhibit low bearing capacity, when subjected to cyclic deformations makes them more sustainable and justifies the reason for using stiff elastic materials sandwiched between the viscoelastic materials. Viscoelastic sandwich beams were developed to fulfil the need for lightweight beams with excellent compression strength, good stiffness-to-mass and strength-to-mass ratios, alongside excellent damping properties. An investigation of the free vibration analysis of a three-layered viscoelastic sandwich beam is performed, both numerically and experimentally, under the assumption of linear viscoelasticity as per the Maxwell model. Three boundary conditions, namely cantilever, fixed-fixed and simply supported, were applied on the beam in order to study its vibrational behaviour under these conditions. The numerically obtained results are compared against the investigated results. A strong correlation is found between the investigations and the numerical results. The graphs presenting the identification of the natural frequencies through experimental impact hammer testing have been shown and the mode shapes for the corresponding natural frequencies have been presented.