STUDY OF DAMPING PROPERTIES OF POLYMER MATRIX COMPOSITES THROUGH WAVE PROPAGATION

We conduct a stochastic analysis to investigate the damping properties of polymer composites with viscoelastic matrix and elastic spherical inclusions. Since damping capability of polymer composites is directly related to the ratio of loss to storage modulus known as tan 3, we use computational homogenization techniques to investigate the effect of vibrational frequency, size and volume fraction of inclusions on tan S. Our results show that tan 3 is highly dependent on the frequency of vibrations as well as the volume fraction of inclusions. Our numerical analyses also show that tan 3 is not sensitive to the size of inclusions as long as inclusions volume fraction remains the same.