Effect of polyurethane material design on damping ability

Abstract Polyurethane (PU) materials attract the interest of researchers for use in damping and vibration isolation. However, an undesirable property of pure polyurethane is a narrow temperature range of mechanical energy absorption. This study presented several ways to design damping PU materials based on two initial polyurethanes with different prepolymer compositions. The difference between the glass transition temperatures of initial PUs was 30°C. One way of designing was to obtain PU material based on a mixture of the two different prepolymers. Another way was to fabricate two‐layer composites from layers of different initial PUs. Тwo‐layer PU composites were fabricated in such ways as by sequential formation layer by layer or by gluing individual films. Continuous materials with a good connection between the layers were formed. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, light microscopy, contact angle measurements, and tensile tests were used for PU materials characterization. Dynamic mechanical analysis was used to investigate the viscoelastic properties and evaluate damping ability. The temperature ranges of effective damping (tan δ ≥ 0.3) from −27°C to 17°C and from −5°C to 42°C were shown for initial PUs. One high loss factor maximum for mixed‐base polyurethane was observed, and the temperature range of effective damping was from −20°C to 32°C. All designed two‐layer composites were shown two loss factor maxima. Their effective damping occurred either in one temperature range (−25°C to 29°C) or in two (−24°C to −14°C and −7°C to 37°C), depending on the design of the composite. The advantage of polyurethane materials design ways such as mixed‐base and two‐layer composite is the ease of control of the temperature region of effective damping. Proposed polyurethane materials designs offer a new approach to developing high‐performed damping materials.