Steel/Viscoelastic/Steel Sandwich Shells Computational Methods and Experimental Validations, #167

Constrained viscoelastic layers have traditionally been considered as damping enhancement mechanisms. The recent large scale availability of steel/viscoelastic/steel sandwich plates has however renewed the need for analysis methods allowing accurate predictions of their dynamic response. A modeling methodology is presented that uses basic shell and solid elements in conjunction with experimentally derived viscoelastic constitutive laws. The choice not to use parametric models (rational fraction, fractional derivatives, ...), while simplifying model characterization and allowing the use of standard finite element codes, leads to models that are really frequency dependent and are thus associated with very high computational costs. Appropriate model reduction, error estimation and pole estimation methods are thus introduced with care taken to allow studies of the frequency/temperature dependence. The proposed methodology is validated for both flat and curved test samples of Usinor Solconfort steel/viscoelastic/steel sandwiches.