Active vibration control of smart multiscale composite beams, plates and shells

Abstract

Owing to their unique structure, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) exhibit unprecedented physical and mechanical properties, CNTs emerged as promising reinforcement with potential benefits in the engineering applications such as nano/micro-electromechanical systems NEMS/MEMS, and structural health monitoring (SHM) systems. An overview of the literature revealed that CNTs can be incorporated to improve the structural damping of composite structures as CNT reinforcement improves the strength and stiffness of the composite structures. With the advancement in nanotechnology, nanofibers like CNTs can be utilized along with conventional fibers for the development of advanced hybrid composite materials. Such composites are known as multiscale composites that are reinforced with nanoscale materials along with macroscale fibers. These multiscale composites have potential applications in almost every field due to their remarkable features like extraordinary mechanical properties, uniformity, flexibility, and stability of the fibers. In this context, we proposed a CNT-based hybrid fiber-reinforced composite (HFRC) material. The HFRC is composed of CNT nanofillers and carbon fibers uniformly distributed along the longitudinal direction in the polymer matrix phase. The effective elastic properties of multiscale HFRC are required prior and therefore, these properties were evaluated as the literature does not provide the same. For this, analytical micromechanical models are developed for predicting the effective elastic properties of HFRC which can be utilized for the active damping analysis of laminated HFRC smart structures. The objective of the present work is to develop a finite element (FE) model to investigate the active vibrational damping of multiscale HFRC smart structures such as beams, plates, and shells by utilizing the layerwise shear deformation theory considering the zig-zag (ZZ) effects.