Design of Viscoelastic Damped Plate Structures with a Multi-Material Topology Optimization Method

A viscoelastic damping layer attached to the plate structure can control vibrations but increases mass. Involving multiple viscoelastic materials, the contribution of different materials needs to be evaluated and allocated. In the paper, a topology optimization model is proposed to find distributions of different viscoelastic materials adopting a multi-material level set method, for maximizing single-order or multi-order modal loss factors. Limited by material volume fraction, the variational principle is applied to establish the velocity field, and the problem is solved by a gradient-based method. Numerical examples are performed to illustrate that loss factors of composite plate structures can be maximized with optimal distributions obtained from the multi-material level set method.