Global sensitivity analysis of damped sandwich plates using sparse polynomial chaos expansions

The present article aims at performing a global sensitivity analysis of modal properties of a frequency dependent viscoelastic sandwich plate. The latter are evaluated using a finite element model relying on Kirchhoff theory for the elastic faces and the Mindlin-Reissner approach for the viscoelastic layer. The plate's characteristics are considered as random variables following log normal laws. Sparse polynomial chaos expansions are employed to evaluate Sobol's indices. For high damping, the resonant frequencies and loss factors turn to be sensitive to the elastic face properties, while in the weak damping case they are mostly affected by the viscoelastic model parameters.