Analysis of frequency-domain vibration response of thin plate attached with viscoelastic free layer damping

To predict the vibration response of viscoelastic composite structure, two key issues need to be conducted, one is introducing the constitutive model of viscoelastic material into the analysis model and the other is describing the real damping behavior of viscoelastic composite structure. The emphasis of this study is to obtain the effects of frequency dependence on the vibration response of viscoelastic composite structure and the method of introducing two kinds of damping (viscoelastic material damping and remaining equivalent viscous damping). Vibration response analysis in frequency domain was investigated for viscoelastically damped plate. A cantilever plate attached with the ZN_1 viscoelastic free layer damping (FLD) was chosen to demonstrate the developed method. Frequency-domain response of the composite plate were solved and the obtained results were compared with the experimental values for the purpose of assessing the rationality of the proposed method. In addition, in order to obtain the effects of viscoelastic material parameters on vibration response of viscoelastic composite structure, a detailed parametric analysis was performed. This study shows that the frequency dependent characteristic of viscoelastic material has significant influence on the vibration response in the resonant region and acceptable results can be achieved in the non-resonant region if frequency dependent parameters are substituted by average values of the viscoelastic parameters reasonably in the analysis process.