As people have become more conscious about how noise and vibration relates to the quality of the vehicle, different methods have been used to provide efficient noise and vibration damping to vehicle sheet metal. Almost all of these methods require adding damping materials to the panel after stamping, or in final assembly of the vehicle. An alternative is to stamp the body panel from a full laminate, but this can cause issues with lower stiffness, formability, and welding. A new concept is to laminate one or more metal patches onto a flat blank using a viscoelastic adhesive and then stamp the body panel. This eliminates the need for additional damping treatments after stamping and also minimizes weight, cost, formability and weldability issues. This presentation will provide performance data on the viscoelastic adhesive, comparisons with alternative damping materials, and highlight the necessary design criteria to ensure that the patch blank can be formed consistently.

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