Effect of interphase properties on the damping response of polymer nano-composites

In this paper a finite element (FE) based unitcell model has been devised with periodic boundary conditions to calculate the effective tan δ of a composite as a function of frequency. Using this method, it is demonstrated that the tan δ of the nano-composite manifests important information about the extent and properties of the interphase region that surrounds each nano-particle. Thus we imply that tan δ measurements provide a simple yet useful experimental tool to understand more about the interphase. However, severe agglomeration or wide size distribution of the nano-particles may introduce errors in measurement.