Damping Properties of Sandwich Truss Core Structures by Strain Energy Method

Sandwich panel structures with stiff face sheets and cellular cores are widely used to support dynamic loads. Combining face sheets made of carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRPs) with an aluminium pyramidal truss improves the damping performance of the structure due to viscoelastic character of CRFP composites. To predict the damping characteristics of the pyramidal truss core sandwich panel the strain energy method is adopted. The procedure for evaluating the damping of the sandwich panel was performed using commercial finite element software NASTRAN and MATLAB. Non-contact vibration tests were performed on the real sandwich panels in order to extract the modal characteristics and compare them with the numerical predictions.