Active control of geometrically nonlinear vibrations of doubly curved smart sandwich shells using 1-3 piezoelectric composites

This paper deals with the analysis of active damping of geometrically nonlinear vibrations of doubly curved smart sandwich shells integrated with a patch of active constrained layer damping (ACLD) treatment. The substrate sandwich shell is composed of orthotropic laminated composite faces separated by a thick flexible core. The constraining layer of the ACLD treatment is made of the vertically/obliquely reinforced 1-3 piezoelectric composites (PZCs). The constrained viscoelastic layer is modeled using the Golla-Hughes-McTavish (GHM) method in the time domain. A three dimensional finite element (FE) model has been developed to study this coupled nonlinear electro-elastic problem. The numerical results indicate that the ACLD patch significantly improves the damping characteristics of the paraboloid and hyperboloid sandwich shells with laminated cross-ply and angle-ply facings for suppressing their geometrically nonlinear vibrations. Particular emphasis has been placed on investigating the effect of the variation of piezoelectric fiber orientation angle on the performance of the ACLD treatment. Unlike the doubly curved laminated composite shells, the performance of the ACLD treatment becomes maximum for causing active damping of geometrically nonlinear vibrations of doubly curved sandwich shells with laminated composite facings if the constraining layer of the treatment is made of obliquely reinforced 1-3 PZC. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.