A Galerkin-type state-space approach for transverse vibrations of slender double-beam systems with viscoelastic inner layer

A novel state-space form for studying transverse vibrations of doublebeam systems, made of two outer elastic beams continuously joined by an inner viscoelastic layer, is presented and numerically validated. As apposite to other methods available in the literature, the proposed technique enables one to considerer i) inhomogeneous systems, ii) any boundary conditions and iii) rate-dependent constitutive law for the inner layer. The formulation is developed by means of Galerkin-type approximations for the fields of transverse displacements in the system. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed approach is accurate and versatile, and lends itself to be used for both frequency- and time-domain analyses.