Vibrations Analysis of Sandwich Beams with Viscoelastic Core

Elastic - viscoelastic - elastic structures are widely used in vibration and noise reduction because of the excellent energy dissipation characteristics of the viscoelastic core. A finite element model is developed for an elastic-viscoelastic-elastic three-layer sandwich beam. The first layer is the constraining layer, the mid-layer is the viscoelastic layer, and the third layer is the base beam. It is assumed that the constraining layer and the base beam are relatively thin i.e. they follows Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. The viscoelastic layer is assumed to experience the shear deformation to yield the largest damping and the compression deformation is negligible. Two numerical examples are provided to verify the finite element model. The results clearly show that the finite element model has excellent efficiency and accuracy.