Analytical and experimental investigation on the free vibration of a floating composite sandwich plate having viscoelastic core

This paper focuses on the free vibration analytical solution of a composite sandwich plate consisting of woven carbon laminated faces and a viscoelastic foam core. In addition to the dry condition, a case of floating on bounded water is considered for the sandwich plate not only in analytical work but also in verification experiments. The equations of motion for the first-order shear-deformation plate in contact with the fluid are derived by using Hamilton's principle, and analytically solved using Navier's procedure. Bounded water boundary conditions and velocity potential function are used to describe the fluid motion. The viscoelastic properties of a marine PVC foam core are extracted from dynamic mechanical analysis. Frequency response function (FRF) method is applied in modal testing for measuring the natural frequencies of the dry and wet sandwich plates. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the analytical results. The effects of the foam core behavior, core thickness, plate dimension ratio, and the fluid density on the natural frequencies are examined and discussed. The decrease of the fundamental mode natural frequency with the presence of the viscoelastic foam core is more prominent for the dry sandwich plate with respect to the wet one already damped by water.