Adaptive damping behaviour of fibre reinforced polymers

Abstract

The dynamic behaviour of composite structures is mainly determined, alongside stiffness and mass, by material and structural damping. Especially in the case of polymeric composites, the physical property damping can vary to a great exyent, depending particularly upon the selection and modification of the matrix system and the fibre orientation, the stacking sepuences and other typical parameters, due to the anisotropy materials. Adaptive material behaviour can help to reduce the resonance vibrations by increasing the damping without control devices: free vibrations of a structure cause an enforced rise of the temperature in the material, leading to a reduction of the vibration amplitude if the heating is parallel to a precise increase of the damping. This reduction brings about a cooling of the structure and thus a decrease of the damping.Hence, it is an automatically controlled process. This existence of heating elements in the laminate allows additional accurate control of matrix material behaviour, in order to minimize resonance vibration by increasing the damping. Suitable options of such adaptive structures are also shown in this paper.