Micromechanical modeling of damping behavior in vibration-reducible cementitious composites

Abstract

Recently, some microparticles have been proven to be effective in improving the damping performance of cementitious composites, which is described by the damping loss factor. Related studies have analyzed damping loss factors of cementitious composites with microparticles to determine optimum mixing proportion, but no efficient numerical analysis method is available for cementitious composites with microparticles. In this study, the micromechanical three-phase model and finite element (FE) strain energy were applied to cementitious composites reinforced with hollow sphere and flake-shaped microparticles. These methods have been widely used with fiber composites but never used with microparticle-reinforced composites. The three-phase model was used here to estimate the damping loss of microparticles, and FE strain energy method was used to analyze the damping loss factor of microparticle-reinforced cementitious composites with the damping loss factor from the three-phase model. This research highlights that the FE strain energy method can be an effective method for estimating the damping loss factor of cementitious composites with different types of microparticles at various volume fractions of fillers with less than 0.1% the least square error between the experimental and simulation results.