Frequencies of transverse vibration of an axially moving viscoelastic beam

One important issue in the investigation of axially moving systems is the viscoelastic constitutive relation. In the present paper, the effects of viscosity on the natural frequency of transverse vibration of an axially moving viscoelastic beam are studied. The viscoelastic material of the moving Euler-Bernoulli beam obeys the Kelvin model. For the first time, the qualitative difference between the natural frequencies with the material time derivative and the partial time derivative in the constitutive relation is investigated. The method of multiple scales with three terms is directly applied to obtain the approximate analytical solutions of the natural frequency. An interesting phenomenon is found in this study. Specifically, for an axially moving viscoelastic beam constituted by the material time derivative, the natural frequencies of transverse vibration may increase with the axial speed. Furthermore, the validity of the analytical results is examined by comparing with two numerical approaches, the differential quadrature methods (DQM) via separating variables and DQM combined with the fast Fourier transforms. There is qualitative difference between the results based on the constitutive relations with the material time derivative and the partial time derivative. Therefore, the results of this work provide an possible approach to determine which kind of the constitutive relation should be adopted to describe the viscoelastic property of axially moving materials.