Analysis Methods for Structures with Visco-Elastic Damping Treatment

Abstract: During aircraft development, the impact of vibrations is examined and how this affects the aircraft structure under different conditions. Those vibrations can damage electronic equipment that are installed within the fuselage and can even lead to material fatigue within the structure. To reduce vibrations there are two approaches that are preferred to use, installing vibration insulators attached between the structure and the electrical component or change the design of the structure to a stiffer one. Those methods are easiest to implement in an early stage of the development but in later stages, when vibration problems usually are detected, it is too difficult and expensive to do major changes of the structure and there is lack of space to implement vibration insulators. A third method is then to apply passive damping in form of damper mats to surfaces on structures where critical vibrations occurs.    The effects on the structural behavior when damper mats are applied to a certain structure are studied in this thesis work. The purpose is to get deeper knowledge about how damper mats can be used to reduce vibrations in aircraft structures. The type of damper mat that is studied is known as Constrained Layer Damping, CLD, which is a sandwich of a visco-elastic material layer and a stiffer constraining material layer. Modelling and simulation methods that are based on commercial FE-software have been developed. The analysis method is based on doing a modal analysis with structural damping taken into account. This makes it possible to predict the overall global damping at each structural mode. The models for damper mats have in this project been verified with experimental testing using typical damper mats. The methodology can be used to predict the behavior of damped structures in order to obtain an effective and lightweight passive damping solution.