Effect of an Overlapping Region on Damping due to Friction in Joined Plate Structures

In this paper, we consider a joined structure in which a long plate is sandwiched between two short plates, and we investigate the effect of the size of an overlapping region, i.e., the short plate length, on damping characteristics. For this, we calculate energy dissipation due to friction at the contact interface, which produces damping, using static contact analysis. In the contact analysis, a surface load is applied at the contact interface and then a distributed forced displacement is applied. For the distributed displacement, mode shape is used to estimate the modal damping ratio for each mode. The results show that the dissipated energy increases with short plate length for all modes, though this increase differs between them. This indicates that the modal damping ratio depends on both the short plate length and the mode. This is explained by changes in the slip displacement and contact force with the short plate length for each mode.