Analysis of the damping of beams with discontinuous viscoelastic damping layer using Integral Finite Elements

Abstract

The damping performance of discontinuous constrained viscoelastic damping layer using Integral Finite Elements (IFE) are investigated in this paper. The IFE involves the dynamic analysis of Elastic-Viscoelastic Composite (EVC) structures with frequency-dependant material properties. EVC structures, which incorporate constrained viscoelastic damping treatment, are modelled using IFE’s and conventional FE’s together to deal with the discontinuous treatment of the constraint damping layers. This approach dramatically reduces the number of degrees of freedom of the FE model compared with conventional FE models. By using specialised algorithms developed for EVC structural dynamics analysis, IFE makes the estimation of the dynamic properties of the EVC structures an easy task similar to the structural dynamics analysis using conventional finite element method. Using an IFE model and the special algorithms, the damping performance of various designs of viscoelastic damping treatments are investigated at extremely low computational costs compared with the use of current commercial FE software packages. A guideline is introduced based on the results of the damping performance analysis for the structural design of viscoelastic damping treatments.