Data for: Damping investigation of cylindrical composite structures with enhanced damping properties

Abstract of the associated article: Constrained layer damping treatments are widely used in mechanical structures to damp acoustic noise and mechanical vibrations. A viscoelastic layer is thereby applied to a structure and covered by a stiff constraining layer.
When the structure is vibrating in a bending mode, the viscoelastic layer is forced to deform in shear mode. Thus, the vibration energy is dissipated as low grade frictional heat.
This paper documents the efficiency of passive constrained layer damping treatments to damp low frequent vibrations of cylindrical composite specimens made of glass fibre reinforced plastics, representing an arm of a novel high-voltage power pylon structure. Different cross sections geometries such as implemented shear webs were investigated in order to study a beneficial effect on the damping characteristics of the cylinder. The viscoelastic damping layers were placed at different locations within the composite cylinder e.g. circumferential and along the neutral axis to evaluate the location-dependent efficiency of the constrained layer damping treatment. The results of the study lead to a thorough understanding of constrained layer damping treatments and to an improved damping design of the cylindrical composite structure representing the power pylon arm. The study has shown a maximal damping performance when placing the damping layer in the median plane perpendicular to the bending load. The results are based on a free decay test of the composite structure.

In the uploaded zip-file, all results, numerical simulation (Abaqus) and Labview files are presented. Furthermore, the Python code for calculating the damping based on the modal strain energy method is also added to the folder.