Property identification of viscoelastic solid materials in nomograms using optimization techniques

Viscoelastic materials have been widely used as devices for vibration control in general.
Frequently, dynamic properties of those materials are provided by manufacturers only in a
graph form in the frequency domain. This is a recurring problem in industry and academia.
Thereby, the goal of this work is to contribute to this important issue which is to obtain
the properties of viscoelastic materials from nomograms supplied by the manufacturer. The
methodology is based on the digitalization of the nomogram of the material and on the sub-
sequent reading of a set of points from two curves in different temperatures. An optimization
problem with simple restrictions is built having characteristic constants of the constituti-
ve models as design variables. The problem is solved by applying a hybrid optimization
technique. The results obtained are presented, and prove to be very promising.