An Experimental Evaluation of Micromechanical Approaches for Damping Characterization of Polymer Matrix Composites

There are two main approaches for prediction of the mechanical properties of composite materials; macro-mechanical and micro-mechanical approaches. At the micromechanical level, analytical, experimental, and semi-empirical methods have been developed to predict the stiffness of composite materials. In this study, these methods have been reviewed and modified to predict the damping properties of composites. In order to validate these theories, experimental techniques using a universal testing machine were performed to extract the specific damping capacity (SDC). The results show that the presented experimental technique can be employed successfully to measure the damping and stiffness properties of composites. In addition, it is concluded that semi-empirical approaches that consider the experimental correlation factors are closer to reality than purely analytical micro-mechanical methods. This study shows that the analytical micromechanical approaches are not suitable to predict the damping properties because of different mechanisms of energy dissipation that have not been discussed in this article.