Vibration Damping of Interleaved Carbon Fiber-Epoxy Composite Beams

Vibration-damping behavior of unidirectional and symmetric angle-ply carbon fiber-epoxy laminates as well as their interleaved counterparts with a layer of poly(ethylene-co-acrylic acid) (PEAA) at the mid-plane was examined. The introduction of the PEAA layer significantly improved the damping capability. The effectiveness of interleaving increased with the flexural modulus of the outer layers. In the case of unidirectional laminates, calculations based on a sandwich structure of isotropic layers quantitatively reproduced this trend. In the case of angle-ply laminates, however, the model predicted only part of the improvement experimentally observed. This was explained in terms of the bending of the angle-ply laminates in the transverse direction which would induce additional deformations in the interleaf layer and was not accounted for by the present model.