An analytical method for prediction of the damping in symmetric balanced laminated composites

Abstract To obtain the effective damping of a laminated composite beam, two different analytical methods were compared. Also, we modified the basic loss factors on the basis of experimental data. In the first method, Ni and Adams's theory was used. In the second method, new energy approach was developed to determine the damping of laminated composite beams. Five typical laminated composites with [±Θ]s, [0/±Θ]s, [0/Θ]s, [0/±Θ/90]s and [90/±Θ/0]s stacking sequences were employed for this study. The present method was favorably compared with Ni and Adams's method. In this study, we found that damping was highly influenced by fiber volume fraction, fiber orientation and stacking sequence.