Tailorable vibration of lightweight viscoelastic biomimetic scale-covered beam

programmable stiffening response, which is also critical in soft robotic materials and aerospace structures. In this paper, we investigate for the first time the dynamic behavior of biomimetic scales with viscoelastic substrates. This study helps in further understanding the origins of nonlinearity and damping in the system. To study the vibrational characteristics, an analytical model has been developed for a simply supported scale-covered beam. The results contrast the two damping sources including the viscoelasticity in the beam and the frictional contact between the scales. It is revealed that even though the scale’s friction provides semi-viscous damping, still these two damping sources follow different damping envelopes. In this study, the free vibration has been studied for a scale-covered viscoelastic beam. Also, due to the existence of scales on just one side of the beam, the anisotropy in the vibration and damping behavior has been discovered and quantified extensively. This study indicates a biomimetic strategy to design a tailorable dampener bio-inspired metamaterial.