Critically damped cantilever beam

QuantaSonics

I hope to use these tools to design a multi-layer cantilever beam with alternate visco-elastic and elastic layers. The goal is a beam with 18" unsupported and 4" glued to a firm support. In operation, this firm support will be vibrating in the audio range and the beam wants to damp out those vibrations and not pass them to the far end.

Does this software deal with vibration analysis with material having elastic moduli expressed as complex numbers?

Has anybody done this sort of analysis and design?

THanks
Gary Nelson
Port Townsend, WA

Victor

Hello Gary

Mecay doesn't have materials with damping included as a complex elastic modulus. What it can do is:

• Discrete damper element (dashpot)
  
• Rayleigh damping with different coefficients per material/layer.
  
• Possibly viscoplastic material with a nonlinear dynamic response analysis. The CCX solver
  should be able to do this but I haven't used that combination of features before. It would be quite an inefficient way to analyse it compared to linear dynamic response with conventional viscous damping but perhaps that's alright for a simple model like this.
  

Everything else you described is OK (multi-layer beam, vibration in audio range, etc.)