A Study of the Thermal Runaway Phase Generated During Cyclic Loading of Viscoelastic Materials Accounting for the Prestress

Abstract The good damping performance and inherent stability of viscoelastic materials in relatively broad frequency bands, besides cost effectiveness, offers many possibilities for practical engineering applications. However, for viscoelastic dampers subjected to dynamic loadings superimposed on static preloads, especially when good isolation characteristics are required at high frequencies, traditional design guidelines can lead to poor designs due to the rapidly increasing rate of temperature change inside the material. This paper is devoted to the numerical and experimental investigation in the degradation of the stiffness and capacity of a viscoelastic material induced by the thermal runaway phase, when it is subjected to dynamic and static loads simultaneously. After the theoretical background, the obtained results in terms of the temperature evolutions at different points within the volume of the material and the hysteresis loops for various static preloads are compared and the main features of the proposed study are highlighted.