Flexural Vibration of Segmented Elastic-Viscoelastic Sandwich Beams

A pair of governing differential equations form the basis for the study of steady-state forced vibration of a sandwich beam with longitudinal nonuniformity in the stiffness and mass of the middle layer. The spatial solution for simply supported boundary conditions is obtained by a Fourier analysis of both material and kinematic variations. The solution is utilized in the numerical study of a sandwich beam with a segmented configuration of elastic and viscoelastic core materials. The results exemplify a tuned configuration of core segments for optimum damping of the first resonant mode.