Influence of geometric and material parameters on the damping properties of multilayer structures

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the influence of deviations in the design and implementation parameters on the damping properties of multilayer viscoelastic structures. This work is based on a numerical approach, which uses recently developed solid–shell elements that have been specifically designed for the modeling of multilayer structures. The originality in the current study lies in the analysis of variation in the design parameters, which could be of geometric or material type. Indeed, although several models have been proposed to study variability, they remain mostly complex to implement. Our approach is rather simple, and is based on the uncertainty on the actual values of several parameters in some well-defined intervals. The developed method is applied to the vibration modeling of multilayer structures, with elastic faces and viscoelastic core material. The resulting problem is discretized by using quadratic solid–shell finite elements. To solve the associated nonlinear equations, we adopt the method that couples the homotopy technique to the Asymptotic Numerical Method (ANM) as well as the Automatic Differentiation (AD) and path continuation. The obtained results provide useful information on the error tolerance margin that could be allowed without compromising structural integrity.