Topology optimization of damping layer in frequency-dependent viscoelastic sandwich panels considering steady-state free vibration.

Attaching viscoelastic materials (VEMs) to structures has been widely used to improve structural dynamic properties. Nevertheless, the adhesion of VEMs inevitably leads to the increase in overall structural mass. Topology optimization is one of the most effective methods to tackle this contradiction. In the traditional topology optimization, VEMs damping cores in constrain layer damping (CLD) sandwich structures are often simplified into linear elastic materials with constant parameters, usually ignoring their frequency-dependent and temperature-dependent dynamic characteristics, which will cause the distortion of the optimization results. Therefore, we propose a topology optimization method for CLD sandwich panels with a frequency-dependent VEM damping core considering steady-state free vibration in this study, where the anelastic displacement fields (ADF) model is adopted to combine the derived frequency-dependent complex constitutive relationship with the layerwise finite element (LFE) model, and the iterative modal strain energy (IMSE) method is used to determine the modal parameters of the CLD sandwich panels. The results of numerical examples show that the proposed method in this study not only has the advantages of simple and intuitive model, high calculation efficiency, and accuracy but also can achieve relatively good dynamic properties of the CLD sandwich structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]