96 Y. Huang and X.W. Tangpong
properties start to degrade as the temperature rises. Those conventional methods
also pose challenges when it comes to integration into heterogeneous systems due
to limitations on space, weight, thermal stability, and damper reliability [12]. One
solution is to engineer the desirable amount of damping directly into composite
materials to develop light-weight and durable structure damping composites that
can be easily integrated into various systems. With the rapid development of nan-
otechnology in the last decade, an attractive opportunity rises as to engineer such
high damping performance composite materials by adding nanoscale fillers such as
carbon nanotubes (CNTs) into polymer composites (see Refs. 12, 13 and the refer-
ences therein) for a variety of mechanical, civil, military, aerospace, and aeronautics
applications. Due to CNT’s thermal stability, the CNT-reinforced nanocomposites
can be used as structural damping materials for extreme temperature applications.
The properties of nanocomposite, including the damping capacity, are highly de-
pendent on the fabrication method and processing techniques used. The damping
properties of nanocomposites have been studied experimentally [12–20]. Dynamic
mechanical analysis (DMA) tests of nanocomposites with different weight fractions
of CNTs showed that the reinforcement of CNTs could have significant influence
to the material’s damping capacity, and both temperature and frequency affected
the damping [14, 15]. Through mechanical cyclic test, the damping property of
CNT-based composites has been found to be dependent on strain, temperature,
CNTs’ weight fraction, and dispersion [16–18]. Friction damping can also be de-
termined from frequency response of the material sample using an accelerometer
and spectrum analyzer. Usually, a film of nanocomposite material is put in between
piezoelectric, epoxy, or metal sheets to form a sandwich beam, and the vibration of
the beam’s tip is then measured under cantilevered boundary condition. A critical
weight fraction of the CNTs has been found to exist for maximum damping of the
composite [12, 19, 20]. From these experimental studies, it was hypothesized that
energy dissipation in nanocomposites was due to interfacial slippage between the
CNTs and the matrix.
In the limited modeling work on evaluating friction damping of nanocompos-
ites, the stick–slip phenomenon between the CNTs and the polymer matrix has been
well accepted [12, 13, 19–22]. Generally, CNT is modeled as a solid cylinder, and
interfacial slippage takes place along the CNT–matrix interface when the interfacial
shear stress reaches a critical value [19]. The molecular dynamics (MD) method was
used to calculate the energy dissipation due to intertube friction in [21], where the
boundary conditions of the nanotube cluster were considered to be periodic [21],
though CNTs do not have continuous geometry. Shear lag analysis was also well
accepted in modeling the interfacial slippage of CNT–matrix [13, 19]. Other mod-
eling methods include (sandwiched) beam vibration analysis [12, 20, 23] and finite
element analysis [19, 24]. These aforementioned models did not take into account
the spatially distributed nature of the CNTs and did not consider varying interfa-
cial stiffness across the CNT–matrix interface. A major property of the CNT is its
high aspect ratio (length is much larger than diameter). When friction contact is
across a spatially distributed interface, the interfacial stiffness is not constant across
the interface and, therefore, should be treated in a statistical sense. The spatially