Experimental investigations of the effect of constraining layer parameters in vibration control of structures

Today, the vibration control of structures is considered as one of the most important and useful study fields, which requires developing the new ways of control and simulating its effect on flexible structures. This study presents a passive vibration control technique applied to a beam type structures. The smart beam consists of an steel beam modeled in cantilevered configuration with surface bonded viscoelastic material and constrained layer. In this study, the effect of constrained layer material in vibration control is studied. In constrained layer damping, the constrained layer material modulus greatly influences the loss factor of the system. Here an attempt has been made to find the loss factor variation due to the constrained layer material modulus with different coverage. Patches of different lengths are bonded on the beam and its effect is analyzed. This study first investigates the effects of constrained layer materials analytically using Commercial software ANSYS 11.0. Then experiments are conducted to verify the ANSYS results. This research proves that there is a considerable increase in the loss factor due to the stiffer constraining layer material as compared with the base layer.