Original Article Vibro-acoustic behavior of a multilayered viscoelastic sandwich plate under a thermal environment P Jeyaraj 1 , Chandramouli Padmanabhan 2 and N Ganesan 2 Abstract This article presents numerical simulation studies on the vibration and acoustic response characteristics of a multilayered viscoelastic sandwich plate in a thermal envi- ronment. Initially the critical buckling temperature is obtained followed by free and forced vibration analyses considering the pre-stress due to the imposed thermal envi- ronment in the plate. The vibration response predicted is then used to compute the sound radiation. The critical buckling temperature and vibration response are obtained using finite element method while sound radiation characteristics are obtained using boundary element method. It is found that resonant amplitude of both the vibration and acoustic response decreases with increase in temperature. The influence of core thick- ness, number of layers, type of thermal field, and type of viscoelastic core material on vibration response sound radiation characteristics are studied in detail. Keywords FEM/BEM, multilayered sandwich plate, thermal buckling, vibration and acoustic response Journal of Sandwich Structures and Materials 13(5) 509–537 ! The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1099636211400129 jsm.sagepub.com 1 School of Mechanical and Building Sciences,Vellore Institute of Technology University, Chennai Campus, Tamil nadu, India. 2 Machine Design Section, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600 036, India. Corresponding author: P. Jeyaraj, School of Mechanical and Building Sciences, Vellore Institute of Technology University, Chennai Campus, Tamil nadu, India Email: jeyaraj.p@vit.ac.in; pjeyaemkm@gmail.com at Indian Inst Of Tech Madras on December 14, 2014 jsm.sagepub.com Downloaded from