Effect of viscoelastic properties of polymer and wavy shape of the CNTs on the vibrational behaviors of CNT/glass fiber/polymer plates

Abstract

Carbon nanotube (CNT)-reinforced polymer nanocomposites possess marvelous stiffness and strength as well as viscoelastic nature due to the time-dependent properties of the polymers. Hence, adequate knowledge about their rheological behavior is required if it is aimed at using such nanomaterials in design of aerospace structures. Present manuscript is arranged to account for the time-dependency of the polymer as well as wavy shape of the CNTs while tracking the vibrational responses of multi-scale hybrid nanocomposites for the first time. To this purpose, a mixture of the modified Halpin–Tsai model and mixture’s rule is used for the homogenization process. According to the dynamic form of the virtual work’s principle, the governing equations of the problem will be attained based on a higher-order shear deformable plate theorem to consider for thick structures. In addition, the Navier’s analytical solution is implemented to extract the system’s natural frequency for simply-supported plates. The findings of this paper indicate on the fact that the vibration suppression in the nanocomposite structures can be delayed if a high value is assigned to the characteristic relaxation time of the polymer. Besides, it is illustrated that hybrid nanocomposites consisted of wavy CNTs (i.e., corresponding with more realistic case) cannot provide ideal frequencies related to the nanocomposites manufactured from straight CNTs.