Modal damping prediction of laminated composites using elastic-viscoelastic correspondence principle: Theory and finite element implementation

A finite element method for the modal damping analysis of composite structures by using a general purpose finite element software was proposed. The method was based on an extended elastic-viscoelastic correspondence principle, which accounted the frequency dependence of viscoelastic complex stiffness matrices. The implementation of the proposed model was described as a UMAT subroutine for ABAQUS/Standard. Subsequently, the analyses of modal damping and frequency response for laminated composites were implemented by using the complex eigenvalue method. As compared with existing approaches, the computed results from this model are more close to the test data. Thus the proposed numerical method is quite efficient and accurate, and capable of providing an effective way to determine the modal damping of anisotropic materials by using ABAQUS code.