Sandwich damping treatments with multi-layer and multi-material viscoelastic cores

The application of a viscoelastic core inside a sandwich plate provides an efficientdissipative mechanism able to introduce high levels of damping in light and flexible structures.Due to the decoupling effect produced by the soft viscoelastic core, the flexural stiffness of thesesandwich panels can be significantly reduced and, therefore, can compromise the behaviorof the damped structure. In this work, it is proposed a multi-layer core configuration whichproved to be able to reduce the decoupling effect, maintaining though the treatment efficiency. Amulti-material configuration is also proposed providing a good solution to enlarge the efficienttemperature range of the damping treatment. A numerical simulation and an experimentalstudy were performed on multi-layer and multi-material specimens. The achieved results verifyand sustain the above assumptions and confirm that, under particular temperature conditions,a multi-layer configuration can be more advantageous than using a single layer. The overallflexural stiffness and damping efficiency increase of the sandwich structure are, thus, the mostimportant benefits when adopting a multi-layer configuration