Modeling of structures supported on viscoelastic mounts using frf substructuring

Abstract

The use of viscoelastic materials has been regarded as an interesting means of achieving effective vibration mitigation in various types of vehicles, machines and structures at a relatively low cost. More recently, considerable effort has been devoted to the development of modeling procedures of structures containing viscoelastic elements taking into account the typical dependence of the mechanical characteristics of viscoelastic materials with respect to frequency and temperature. In this paper, it is suggested a modeling strategy of structural systems supported by viscoelastic mounts, based on a FRF coupling technique. Such strategy enables to predict the dynamic behavior of the complete system (main structure+viscoelastic mount) a set of FRFs of the main structure and the driving point frequency response function of the viscoelastic mount, which can be obtained either experimentally or by finite element modeling. This second alternate is considered in the paper. After presenting the underlying theoretical aspects, the results of numerical simulations of two-dimensional civil structures are presented, emphasizing the procedure conceived for computing the FRF of the viscoelastic mount from a detailed finite element model using a commercial package and the FRF coupling procedure. In these numerical simulations, the influence of temperature on vibration attenuation is investigated.