Uniaxial Material Damping Measurements Using a Fiber Optic Lattice: A Discussion of its Performance Envelope

Abstract

Damping is the internal transfer of kinetic energy to other forms of energy. Today, most methods use either bending or torsional vibration to measure damping. This means that the strain field in the specimen is nonhomogeneous. If the damping of the tested material is linear, strain-independent, the values acquired with these traditional methods will be equal to the intrinsic material damping of the material. If, however, the damping is strain-dependent, nonlinear, the measured value will be an average of the damping of the specimen, and not equal to its intrinsic material damping. To address this problem, a method is required to experimentally determine the damping in uniaxial tension in order to produce the same strain level in all parts of the test specimen and hence obtain a measurement of the intrinsic material damping. Using such a method, it is possible to view the material damping as the phase angle between the stress and the strain in a harmonic oscillation. In this paper, a method is suggested for measuring this phase shift in uniaxial tension to determine the material damping properties. It uses a tensile test machine, an optical fiber Bragg grating technique and a lock-in amplifier. Measurements with the phase shift technique have been suggested previously, but its performance envelope has been overestimated. In this paper, the performance envelope is discussed and restricted. It is shown that the envelope depends on the specimen length, loss factor and test frequency. An optical strain measurement method is also believed to help avoid many electrical measurement problems seen with the originally proposed method.