Semi-analytical model for the mechanical behavior of a spinning viscoelastic layer under gravity loads

Recent works have proposed novel semi-analytical computational methods to model the viscoelastic rolling behavior of objects such as cylinders and spheres, including rolling resistance. This paper introduces and applies an extension of such methods to model the steady-state spinning behavior of a circular viscoelastic coating under the effect of gravity. The proposed modeling technique is wide-ranging in that it can accommodate any linear viscoelastic material characterized by its most general frequency-domain master-curves. The results of the model reveal that the mechanical behavior of the spinning viscoelastic coating is significantly different from that of a similar coating with purely elastic properties. The method can potentially be applied to characterize viscoelastic materials from either laboratory or field measurements. It could also be used to study the behavior of precision measurement devices and propellant grains under gravitational loads, or to model very large scale phenomena such as the tidal locking of celestial bodies.