Influence of the Poisson's ratio on the efficiency of viscoelastic damping treatments

An efficient way of mitigating noise and vibration is to embed viscoelastic patches into the host structure. Viscoelastic properties are of significant importance in determining the performance of the passive damping treatment. The behaviour of homogeneous isotropic materials is described by two elastic constants (generally the Young modulus and the Poisson ratio, or the shear and bulk moduli), which are frequency- and temperature-dependent in the case of viscoelastic materials. In practice, the Poisson's ratio is often considered as independent of temperature and frequency. One goal of this work is to numerically evaluate the validity of this assumption and its limitations (frequency range, thickness of the viscoelastic layer). To this end, a thermo-mechanical characterization of a viscoelastic material is carried out by dynamic measurements of the complex shear and bulk moduli, allowing the indirect measurement of the frequency- and temperature-dependent Poisson's ratio. Moreover, the measurements of the Poisson's ratio (direct or indirect) can lead to considerable uncertainties. For instance, large discrepancies have been observed when characterizing the Poisson's ratio of polymer foams. Another goal of this work is to investigate the influence of those uncertainties on the dynamic response of a damped structure.