Does a Real Material Behave Fractionally? Applications of Fractional Differential Operators to the Damped Structure Borne Sound in Viscoelastic Solids

Abstract

Time dependent analysis of the dynamic damped behavior of continua are mathematically modelled by partial differential equations. One obtains uniqueness, existence and stability (well posed problems) by the implementation of the correct initial boundary conditions. However, by taking memory effects into consideration, any change in the past of the system changes the future dynamic behavior. Classical damping descriptions fail when describing the behavior of many materials, like teflon. This is because in classical theory the operators are local ones. The implementation of fractional time derivatives into the partial differential equations is an alternative technique to overcome these problems. Thereby the time derivative operator is a global one, memory effects in structure borne sound can be calculated. In this paper the theory of fractional time derivative operators and their application in continuum mechanics is presented. The main result when using this method for damping behavior is that a global operator is needed which takes the whole history into account. We call this theory the functional calculus method instead of the well-known fractional calculus with the use of initial conditions. In order to show the efficiency of this method the calculated impulse response of a viscoelastic rod is compared with measurements. It is shown that the damping behavior is described much better than by other models with comparably few parameters. Moreover, it is the only one that works in a wide frequency range and can describe the dispersion of the resonance frequencies. The implementation of this damping description in a Boundary Element Code is an application of dynamics of 3D continua in the frequency domain.