NS-COMP · Development of composite structures having negative stiffness inclusions and exceptional damping properties

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Project objective

The EU is a world leader in the development and manufacturing of structural products for the transport industry, with theaeronautical sector alone providing more than 500,000 jobs, generating a turnover of close to €140 billion in 2013 . Noise isa serious form of environmental pollution affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens worldwide and having multiplesocio-economic consequences. Moreover, intense vibration can endanger the structural integrity and performance ofequipment and hardware. Modern industrial structures are made of composite materials due to their well-known benefits.Despite their superior structural characteristics, composite structures exhibit poor dynamic and acoustic isolation levelscompared to conventional metallic ones. In order to keep noise and vibration levels at acceptable limits, structuralmanufacturers are nowadays obliged to extensively employ constrained-layer damping treatments that are expensive interms of additional mass and space usage.NS-COMP will bring together an ER being expert in ‘wave propagation in phononic crystals and acoustic mematerials’ and ahost institution carrying leading academic know-how in ‘design, optimization and manufacturing of multifunctionalcomposites’. The Fellowship aims at developing novel structures having exceptional damping properties combined with theoutstanding structural performance of a layered composite at minimum extra mass, volume and cost. This will be attainedthrough the inclusion of internal purely mechanical Negative Stiffness (NS) elements in the core of the structure. Accordingto conservative preliminary simulations, a successful completion of NS-COMP will deliver structures that have a dampingratio at least 300% superior (for the same stiffness/mass fraction) to that of the structures currently employed in the transportindustry.The secondment of the ER to AIRBUS will ensure the applicability of this new family of structures to real-world industrialscenarios.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM · NottinghamCoordinatorUnited Kingdom

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/785839