Experimental and numerical evaluation of viscoelastic sandwich beams

Abstract Viscoelastic materials can dissipate a large amount of energy when subjected to cyclic shear deformations, but they have low bearing capacity. Therefore they are often employed as a damping layer in sandwich structures. These sandwich structures present a high damping ratio and simple application. In order to design sandwich structures, many aspects ranging from computer modeling to laboratory testing should be considered. In this study, a test set of experiments were performed and results are compared with a numerical GHM (Golla, Hughes and Mc Tavish method) based model, in order to establish a method to support viscoelastic sandwich beam design. In this way, starting from the dynamic properties of a viscoelastic material, a numerical model is used to evaluate the behavior of these structures. Comparisons with uncontrolled structures are also presented, showing the dissipative characteristics of this passive control.