Efficiency of Particle Damping on Lightweight CFRP Structures

Carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) are becoming a common solution to minimize the structural weight in aerospace and automotive applications. The dynamic response of such lightweight structures presents higher acceleration levels than equivalent metallic designs. Hence, damping techniques whose performance depends on accelerations like particle damping (PD) have a strong potential to damp them. This paper intends to demonstrate how vibrations on CFRP structures can be efficiently damped with PD, resulting in an added weight reduction compared to an equivalent viscoelastic treatment. First, it is analytically put in evidence how the usage of CFRP materials increases the performance of PD on a rectangular clamped plate. This is followed by a parametric study which permitted to improve the performance of the dampers by better understanding their characteristic behavior under vertical excitations. After optimizing the damper design, the paper finishes with an experimental comparison of PD and a viscoelastic constrained-layer treatment on steel and CFRP flat panels, which experimentally shows how the advantage of using PD increases when the CFRP sample is considered.