The Effective Properties Of The Electro-Viscoelastic Composite Using Energy Method

Abstract

Abstract The potential application of electro-viscoelastic composites in active and passive control of structural vibration drives the research on development of micro and macro mechanical methods for the accurate characterization of damping or energy dissipation. The energy method is popular in the characterization of viscoelastic composites. In this work, the energy method is extended to characterize the energy storage and dissipation of electro-viscoelastic composites. The energy method assumes zero phase difference among components of strain/electric field at a point whereas in case of high damping electro-viscoelastic composites, these phase differences are significant. Hence, the energy method is reformulated to compute the effective properties. The computed properties using micromechanical generalized method of cells (GMC) with modified formulation of energy method are observed to be more accurate compared to earlier energy formulation with respect to correspondence principle. The effective electromechanical coefficients are associated with the loss factors even though corresponding coefficients of constituents are lossless.