On attenuation of free and forced waves in an infinitely long visco-elastic layer of a constant thickness

The conventional concepts of a loss factor and a complex-valued elastic module are used to study wave attenuation in a visco-elastic layer. The hierarchy of reduced order models is employed to assess attenuation levels of free and forced waves in various situations. First, the free waves are considered. In the low frequency limit, the attenuation of these waves is found to be in the excellent agreement with the existing knowledge. At high frequencies, predictions of the reduced order models fully agree with the solutions of exact Rayleigh–Lamb problem. Alternative excitation cases are considered for the forcing problem and a measure of the attenuation level is proposed and validated. The differences between two regimes, the low frequency one, when a waveguide supports only one propagating wave, and the high frequency one, when several waves are supported, are demonstrated and explained.