Structural damping using encapsulated Shear Thickening Fluids

Smart structures with tunable damping and stiffness characteristics are of high interest to aerospace applications, but often require an external power source to be activated. This can be avoided by using highly concentrated silica suspensions, which exhibit a shear-thickening behavior, linked to a dramatic increase in viscous dissipation. These materials are however liquid at rest, and sensitive to humidity, so they are difficult to implement as such into structural applications. In the present work, highly concentrated solutions of monodisperse silica particles in PEG were selected for their strong thickening effect at rather low critical shear strain. Damping properties were characterized by measuring the energy dissipated per cycle at low frequency (