  Biomimetic scale-covered substrates are architected meta-structures
exhibiting fascinating emergent nonlinearities via the geometry of collective
scales contacts. In spite of much progress in understanding their elastic
nonlinearity, their dissipative behavior arising from scales sliding is
relatively uninvestigated in the dynamic regime. Recently discovered is the
phenomena of viscous emergence, where dry Coulomb friction between scales can
lead to apparent viscous damping behavior of the overall multi-material
substrate. In contrast to this structural dissipation, material dissipation
common in many polymers has never been considered, especially synergestically
with geometrical factors. This is addressed here for the first time, where
material visco-elasticity is introduced via a simple Kelvin-Voigt model for
brevity and clarity. The results contrast the two damping sources in these
architectured systems: material viscoelasticity, and geometrical frictional
scales contact. It is discovered that although topically similar in effective
damping, viscoelsatic damping follows a different damping envelope than dry
friction, including starkly different effects on damping symmetry and specific
damping capacity.
