Spatial Patterning of the Viscoelastic Core Layer of a Hybrid Sandwich Composite Material to Trigger Its Vibro-Acoustic Performances 2018-01-1500

With the aim of decreasing CO₂ emissions, car producers’ efforts are focused, among others, on reducing the weight of vehicles yet preserving the overall vibrational comfort. To do so, new lightweight materials combining high stiffness and high (passive) damping are sought. For panels essentially loaded in bending, sandwich composites made of two external metallic stiff layers (skins) and an inner polymeric (i.e. absorbing) core are broadly used. Now aiming at creating materials by design with a better control of the final performance of the part, the tuning of the local material properties is pursued. To this end, the present work focuses on controlling the spatial in-plane viscoelastic properties of the polymeric core of such sandwich structures. The spatial patterning is achieved using a recently developed UV irradiation selective technique of Room Temperature Vulcanization (RTV) silicone elastomeric membrane, in which the ultraviolet (UV) irradiation dose, curing time and temperature are the process parameters controlling the viscoelastic properties of the polymeric membrane. Finally, a protocol for the realization of architected aluminum - silicone - aluminum composite sandwich panels is proposed. The influence of UV irradiation selective technique is demonstrated by Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) measurements on the silicone core itself and by the Corrected Force Analysis Technique (CFAT) to measure the equivalent Young’s modulus and damping of the sandwich structure over a large frequency band. As a first demonstration application, sandwich beams with different core patterns (homogeneous and heterogeneous) are designed and tested. Furthermore, the analytical formalism developed by Guyader et al. is used to model the vibro-acoustic performances of the homogenous sandwich beams and fair model-experiments comparisons are obtained. The spatial patterning of the polymer layer is found to successfully affect the local properties of the composite heterogeneous beam as evidenced by the CFAT method. Finally, this work permits the enunciation of guidelines for designing complex architectured systems with further control of the vibro-acoustics performances.