Interfacial reinforced viscoelastic damper: experimental and theoretical study

The interlayer tearing of a plate viscoelastic (VE) damper is an important issue, which may cause failure of the damper. In this work, two new interfacial reinforced damper structures are proposed, which can effectively enhance the working ability of the VE damper. Dynamic performance tests are carried out on the reinforced VE dampers with a series of temperatures, frequencies and displacement amplitudes. The experimental results show that the proposed VE dampers have great energy dissipation capacity, and a damper with a baffle structure has better performance. The finite element method (FEM) is used to investigate the impact of structure optimization on the performance improvement of the VE dampers. The simulation results demonstrate that the baffle structure significantly enhances the stiffness of the damper, which is consistent with the experimental findings. In order to characterize the influence of frequency, temperature and displacement amplitude on the VE dampers, a modified fractional-derivative Burgers model is proposed, which introduces internal variable theory and a temperature-frequency equivalent principle to explain the amplitude and temperature effect, respectively. The comparison between theoretical and experimental results reveals little discrepancies, thereby affirming the precision of the mathematical model.