In general, a plastic sheet displays vibration-damping by converting vibration energy into thermal energy. In this study, the vibration-damping for copolymers including butyl acrylate was evaluated.
Copolymer of butyl acrylate (B) grafted onto acrylonitrile (A)-styrene (S) copolymers and methyl methacrylate (M)-butyl acrylate (B) random copolymer were used to prepare eight kinds of specimens having different butyl acrylate contents. A cantilever method was adopted for obtaining frequency response spectra of the specimens. The loss factor of laminated steel plates was also obtained. The loss factor and shear modulus were calculated for copolymers from that of the laminated steel plates.
AS-B graft copolymers seemed to give a maximum loss factor at temperatures above 120°C. Therefore the loss factor at room temperature is not sufficiently large. The loss factor for the M-B copolymer having butyl acrylate of 54 mol% was 2.0 in the frequency range from 1Hz to 1kHz at 40°C. Therefore it is expected that M-B copolymer is very useful for vibration-damping at around room temperature.