Usually damped structures, consisting of a constrained layer damping (CLD) and free layer damping (FLD) design, are characterized via dynamic mechanic analysis (DMA) in bending mode. Since laminates with thicknesses from 10 to 100 μm exhibit a very low bending stiffness it isn’t possible to determine their damping properties in bending mode with standard DMA setups. Therefore in the present work the main objective was to introduce a new method to overcome this drawback.
Two main geometries were used, such as a variation of the bending mode where the laminates were clamped at the outer supports and on the other hand a set-up where the geometry of a support of loudspeakers was replicated, which was called “speaker” mode. The damping behavior of the laminates then was characterized via the mechanical loss factor tan δ and subsequently compared to results in DMA shear mode. The second objective was to characterize the influence of the design, with a 2-layer laminate consisting of a free layer damping design and a 3-layer laminate with a constrained layer damping design.
A method in DMA “speaker” mode was successfully set up. The test parameters were chosen in order to resemble the support of loudspeakers. Therefore with the laminates two beads with a height of approximately 1 mm were formed symmetrically in gaps of 3 mm between the outer fixtures and the drive shaft. Furthermore in the test the laminates were loaded with a dynamic displacement of 600 μm. Due to the low bending stiffness of the laminates the highest test frequency was limited to 10 Hz. In accordance with literature for the 2-layer laminates significant lower damping levels were found than for the 3-layer laminates. Whereas the constrained layer damping laminate (3-layer) showed a good correlation between measurements in “speaker” and in shear mode, the 2-layer laminate showed a significant loss factor increase at high temperatures in shear mode, which was related to entropy elastic effects.
