Computational modelling and analysis of effect of viscoelastic materials on damping and vibrational behaviors of composite structures—an extensive review

This article reported an extensive review of computational modelling and analysis on damping and vibrational behaviors of viscoelastic structures, including experimental techniques. viscoelastic materials have emerged as an effective technology for enhancing damping characteristics in composite structures because of their ability to damp vibration and the ability to conserve the geometry of the material after deformation. In structural design viscoelastic material is never employed alone, it is always adhered to the thin-walled structure to form a damping layer of different structural configurations such as sandwich structure configurations and reinforced configurations. It is worth mentioning that viscoelastic materials are quite frequency-dependent meaning that the vibrational properties keep varying with the excitation frequency, accordingly, yielding complex natural frequencies of vibration. This paper provides a primary discussion on the basic forming principles of linear viscoelastic material providing comparisons of different viscoelastic material mathematical models, and applications of viscoelastic material including their effects on composite structure damping and vibrational behaviors. Moreover, different computational methods for dynamic behaviors of viscoelastic sandwich structures including analytical method, finite element method, and mixed method were assessed to provide insights into the limitations of each approach. The drawbacks of each calculation theory for various traditional and recent configurations are systematically presented in engineering structures containing viscoelastic followed by a detailed description and comparison of different modeling methods, their applicability, and their respective comparisons.