A New Efficient Approach to Simulate Material Damping in Metals by Modeling Thermoelastic Coupling

The realistic prediction of material damping is crucial in the design and dynamic simulation of many components in mechanical engineering. Material damping in metals occurs mainly due to the thermoelastic effect. This paper presents a new approach for implementing thermoelastic damping into finite element simulations, which provides an alternative to computationally intensive, fully coupled thermoelastic simulations. A significantly better agreement between simulation results and experimental data was achieved, when compared with the empirical damping values found in the literature. The method is based on the calculation of the generated heat within a vibration cycle. The temperature distribution is determined by the mechanical eigenmodes and the energy converted into heat, and thus dissipated, is calculated. This algorithm leads to modal damping coefficients that can then be used in subsequent analyses of dynamically excited oscillations. The results were validated with experimental data obtained from vibration tests. In order to measure material damping only, a test setup excluding friction and environmental influences was developed. Furthermore, comparisons with fully coupled thermoelastic simulations were performed. It was clear that the new approach achieved results comparable to those of a computationally expensive, coupled simulation with regard to the loss factors and frequency response analyses.