Investigating the performance of the damped vibration absorber made of a three-layer beam with a viscoelastic core

In this study the performance of a dynamic vibration absorber made of a curved sandwich beam with a viscoelastic core and an attached rigid mass is investigated. For this purpose the primary structure is modeled as a mass-spring and the sandwich beam is modeled using layerwise-based methods. This is done by using the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory for the top and bottom layers and using higher-order shear theory for the core. The constitutive behavior of the viscoelastic material is also described by the complex modulus approach where the dependence of the modulus to frequency and temperature is also accounted for. The solution is provided by using the finite element method with three-node line element and using a combination of Lagrangian and Hermitian shape functions. Numerical studies include investigating the effects of the beam geometric parameters, the mass and gravity center of the rigid mass on the maximum response amplitude, which is used to design an absorber with better performances. Also, the robustness of the method under the effect of thermal variations is assessed and an acceptable range of thermal variation for using the absorber is obtained. It is found that the absorber could significantly reduce the resonance vibration and changes of about 20 oC in environment temperature would not deteriorate its performance.