  Stiff scales adorn the exterior surfaces of fishes, snakes, and many
reptiles. They provide protection from external piercing attacks and control
over global deformation behavior to aid locomotion, slithering, and swimming
across a wide range of environmental condition. In this letter, we investigate
the dynamic behavior of biomimetic scale substrates for further understanding
the origins of the nonlinearity that involve various aspect of scales
interaction, sliding kinematics, interfacial friction, and their combination.
Particularly, we study the vibrational characteristics through an analytical
model and numerical investigations for the case of a simply supported scale
covered beam. Our results reveal for the first time that biomimetic scale beams
exhibit viscous damping behavior even when only Coulomb friction is postulated
for free vibrations. We anticipate and quantify the anisotropy in the damping
behavior with respect to curvature. We also find that unlike static pure
bending where friction increases bending stiffness, a corresponding increase in
natural frequency for the dynamic case does not arise for simply supported
beam. Since both scale geometry, distribution and interfacial properties can be
easily tailored, our study indicates a biomimetic strategy to design
exceptional synthetic materials with tailorable damping behavior.
