Evaluating the temperature and glass fibre reinforcement effects on the damping properties of the shape memory polymers

Shape memory polymers (SMPs) are novel class of active polymers that have a unique ability to undergo a substantial shape deformation and subsequently recover the original shape when exposed to a particular external stimulus. In the past, more attention has given to the shape memory alloys (SMA) than the SMP because unreinforced SMPs have substantial lower mechanical characteristics. Though when reinforced with continuous fibres their properties dramatically improve. SMPs and their composites (SMPCs) have been used in a vast range of applications from biomedical devices to morphing and deployable structures. However, dynamic mechanical analysis has shown that SMPs have promising damping characteristics that give them significance in the control of structural noise and vibration applications by just control the SMP temperature. In this paper, styrene base SMP and its woven glass fibre SMPCs have been tested to investigate their damping properties. Dynamic mechanical analyzer (DMA Q800) has used to evaluate the loss factor of both neat and composite samples, and LMS SCADAS data acquisition systems has used inside thermal control chamber to examine the damping efficiency at different temperatures where two temperatures (25°C and 65°C) have investigated. DMA results revealed that, near the glass transition temperature, neat SMP has shown loss factor up to (1), however fibre reinforcement has reduced this value in the SMPC samples. Furthermore, glass fibre reinforcement has reduced damping ratio from 0.3 for SMP to 0.07 for SMPC. Results have also shown that temperature increase from room temperature to 65°C has increased the damping ratio by 33% for the SMP sample and 6 times increment for the SMPC sample.