An effective coating material solution and modeling technique for damping oriented design of thin walled mechanical components

A multi-layer coating beam model is proposed to find, at the modelling stage, optimal coating architectures to be applied to mechanical components, in order to maximize the vibration damping in industrial operating conditions. Recent experimental works showed that application of coatings may influence vibration damping, and that dissipative actions can be mainly localized at the interlaminar interface. The aim of this paper is to present a mechanical model for numerically simulating the response of a uniform, multi-layered composite beam specimen taking into account of these interlaminar dissipative actions, so that reducing the need to experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of many candidate coating solutions. The model is based on a modified third order zig zag beam theory, where the contribution of the frictional actions is modelled by means of complex, elastohysteretic distributed actions localized at the layer interfaces. The resulting multi layered beam model degrees of freedom do not depend on the number of the coating layers and the proposed technique showed to be computationally effective to simulate the damping behaviour of different virtual specimens. A frequency and application dependent damping estimator is proposed and some application examples are presented and critically discussed.