Interface stress effect tuning and enhancing the energy dissipation of staggered nanocomposites

ABSTRACT

Natural biological composites and artificial biomimetic staggered composites with nanoscale internal structures can exhibit extraordinary energy dissipation, compared with conventional composites. It is believed that the interface stress effects of the interfaces between hard platelets and a viscous matrix play an important role in the extraordinary damping properties of such nanocomposites. In this study, a viscoelastic model is established to investigate the mechanism of the influence that the interface stress effect has on the damping properties, based on the Gurtin-Murdoch interface model and the tension-shear chain model. An explicit analytical solution of the effective dynamic moduli characterising the damping properties is obtained by using the correspondence principle, which is also validated by comparison with a finite element analysis. From the obtained analytical solution, an interface factor is abstracted to characterise the synergistic effect of the feature size and material parameters on the damping properties. Based on the model established, the optimal size of the platelets and the optimal loading frequency can be designed to achieve superior energy dissipation, when the staggered nanocomposites bear the dynamic load. Therefore, the findings of the present study not only reveal the damping mechanism of biological structures at nanoscale but also provide useful guidelines for the design of biomimetic nanocomposites from the nanoscale to the macroscopic scale.