Elastodynamic Behaviour of Laminate Structures with Soft Thin Interlayers: Theory and Experiment

Laminate structures composed of stiff plates and thin soft interlayers are widely used in aerospace, automotive and civil engineering encouraging the development of reliable non-destructive strategies for their condition assessment. In the paper, elastodynamic behaviour of such laminate structures is investigated with emphasis on its application in ultrasonic based NDT and SHM for the identification of interlayer mechanical and interfacial contact properties. A particular attention is given to the practically important frequency range, in which the wavelength considerably exceeds the thickness of the film. Three layer model with spring-type boundary conditions employed for imperfect contact simulation is used for numerical investigation. Novel effective boundary conditions are derived via asymptotic expansion technique and used for analysis of the peculiar properties of elastic guided waves in considered laminates. It is revealed that the thin and soft film influences the behaviour of the laminate mainly via the effective stiffnesses being a combination of the elastic moduli of the film, its thickness and interface stiffnesses. To evaluate each of these parameters separately (or to figure out that the available experimental data are insufficient), a step-wise procedure employing the effective boundary conditions is proposed and tested versus the laser Doppler vibrometry data for Lamb waves in Aluminium/Polymer film/Alumunium structure. The possibility of using film-related thickness resonance frequencies to estimate the film properties and contact quality is also demonstrated. Additionally, the rich family of edge waves is also investigated, and the splitting of fundamental edge waves into pairs is revealed.

Analysis of Eigenfrequencies of a Circular Interface Delamination in Elastic Media Based on the Boundary Integral Equation Method

The widespread of composite structures demands efficient numerical methods for the simulation dynamic behaviour of elastic laminates with interface delaminations with interacting faces. An advanced boundary integral equation method employing the Hankel transform of Green’s matrices is proposed for modelling wave scattering and analysis of the eigenfrequencies of interface circular partially closed delaminations between dissimilar media. A more general case of partially closed circular delamination is introduced using the spring boundary conditions with non-uniform spring stiffness distribution. The unknown crack opening displacement is expanded as Fourier series with respect to the angular coordinate and in terms of associated Legendre polynomials of the first kind via the radial coordinate. The problem is decomposed into a system of boundary integral equations and solved using the Bubnov-Galerkin method. The boundary integral equation method is compared with the meshless method and the published works for a homogeneous space with a circular open crack. The results of the numerical analysis showing the efficiency and the convergence of the method are demonstrated. The proposed method might be useful for damage identification employing the information on the eigenfrequencies estimated experimentally. Also, it can be extended for multi-layered composites with imperfect contact between sub-layers and multiple circular delaminations.

Effective Behavior of Nonlinear Microperiodic Composites with Imperfect Contact Via the Asymptotic Homogenization Method.

The asymptotic homogenization method is applied here to one-dimensional boundary-value problems for nonlinear differential equations with rapidly oscillating piecewise-constant coefficients which model the behavior of nonlinear microperiodic composites, in order to assess the influence of interfacial imperfect contact on the effective behavior. In particular, a nonlinear power-law flux on the gradient of the unknown was considered. Several calculations were performed and are discussed at the end of this work, including a comparison of some results with variational ounds, which is also an important approach of this work.

A methodology for hygrothermal modelling of imperfect masonry interfaces

Hygrothermal models are important tools for assessing the risk of moisture-related decay mechanisms which can compromise structural integrity, loss of architectural features and material. There are several sources of uncertainty when modelling masonry, related to material properties, boundary conditions, quality of construction and two-dimensional interactions between mortar and unit. This paper examines the uncertainty at the mortar-unit interface with imperfections such as hairline cracks or imperfect contact conditions. These imperfections will alter the rate of liquid transport into and out of the wall and impede the liquid transport between mortar and masonry unit. This means that the effective liquid transport of the wall system will be different then if only properties of the bulk material were modelled. A detailed methodology for modelling this interface as a fracture is presented including definition of material properties for the fracture. The modelling methodology considers the combined effect of both the interface resistance across the mortar-unit interface and increase liquid transport in parallel to the interface, and is generalisable to various combinations of materials, geometries and fracture apertures. Two-dimensional DELPHIN models of a clay brick/cement-mortar masonry wall were created to simulate this interaction. The models were exposed to different boundary conditions to simulate wetting, drying and natural cyclic weather conditions. The results of these simulations were compared to a baseline model where the fracture model was not included. The presence of fractures increased the rate of absorption in the wetting phase and an increased rate of desorption in the drying phase. Under cyclic conditions, the result was higher peak moisture contents after rain events compared to baseline and lower moisture contents after long periods of drying. This demonstrated that detailed modelling of imperfections at the mortar-unit interface can have a definitive influence on results and conclusions from hygrothermal simulations.

Multi-Layer Transient Heat Conduction Involving Perfectly-Conducting Solids

Boundary conditions of high kinds (fourth and sixth kind) as defined by Carslaw and Jaeger are used in this work to model the thermal behavior of perfect conductors when involved in multi-layer transient heat conduction problems. In detail, two- and three-layer configurations are analyzed. In the former, a thin layer modeled as a lumped body is subject to a surface heat flux on the front side while it is in perfect (fourth kind) or in imperfect (sixth kind) thermal contact with a semi-infinite or finite body on the back side. When dealing with a semi-infinite body in imperfect contact, the temperature solution is derived by means of the Laplace transform method. Green’s function approach is also used but for solving the companion case of a finite body in perfect contact with the thin film. In the latter, a thin layer with internal heat generation is located between two semi-infinite or finite bodies in perfect/imperfect contact. For the sake of thermal symmetry, such a three-layer structure reduces to a two-layer configuration. Results are given in both tabular and graphical forms and show the effect of heat capacity and thermal resistance on the temperature distribution of conductive layers.