Active damping of geometrically nonlinear vibrations of doubly curved laminated composite shells

This paper deals with the analysis of active constrained layer damping (ACLD) of geometrically nonlinear transient vibrations of doubly curved laminated composite shells. Vertically/obliquely reinforced 1–3 piezoelectric composite (PZC) and active fiber composite (AFC) materials are used as the materials of the constraining layer of theACLD treatment. The Golla–Hughes–McTavish (GHM) method has been implemented to model the constrained viscoelastic layer of the ACLD treatment in time domain. The first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) and the Von Kármán type non-linear strain displacement relations are used for analyzing this coupled electro-elastic problem. A three dimensional finite element (FE) model of doubly curved laminated smart composite shells integrated with ACLD patches has been developed to investigate the performance of these patches for controlling the geometrically nonlinear transient vibrations of the shells. The numerical results indicate that the ACLD patches significantly improve the damping characteristics of the doubly curved laminated cross-ply and angle-ply shells for suppressing their geometrically nonlinear transient vibrations. It is found that the performance of the ACLD patch with its constraining layer being made of the AFC is significantly higher than that of the ACLD patch with vertically/obliquely reinforced 1–3 PZC constraining layer. The effects of variation of piezoelectric fiber orientation in both the obliquely reinforced 1–3 PZC and the AFC constraining layers on the control authority of the ACLD patches have also been investigated.