Natural frequency, damping and forced responses of sandwich plates with viscoelastic core and graphene nanoplatelets reinforced face sheets

The free and forced vibration analysis of a sandwich plate with the viscoelastic core and face layers reinforced functionally with multilayered graphene nanoplatelets is presented. Different graphene nanoplatelet distributions are considered through the thickness, and the effective properties of the graphene reinforced nanocomposite are obtained by the rule of mixture. The equations of motion are extracted using Hamilton's principle and assuming the classical thin plate theory for face layers and the first-order shear deformation theory for the thick viscoelastic core. Assuming the simply-supported boundary condition for all edges, the displacement components are proposed by Fourier series and the complex eigenvalue problem is solved to obtain the natural frequencies as well as the loss factors. The results are validated with available investigations, and effects of some important parameters on the free and forced responses of the sandwich plate are studied.