Thin-walled composite plates have been widely used as structural components in various engineering applications to bear static and dynamic loads. The vibrations caused by the dynamic loads are transmitted to passengers and precision equipment, which reduces the crew’s comfort, affects normal operations, and shortens the service life of high-precision equipment [1]. There is a rising demand to design optimal composites that have a superior combination of high stiffness and exceptional vibration mitigation capability. Over the past few decades, active and passive methods have been developed to improve the dynamic performance of composite structures [2,3,4,5]. Among these methods, incorporating a passive damping material layer into the base plates (i.e., free-layer [6] or constrained-layer [7,8]) is one of the most efficient, robust, and low-cost methods. Intrinsically, the vibration performance of the composite plates is determined by the properties of the damping materials and their topological arrangements on the base plates. Conventional design practices for damping composite architectures are focused on parameter analysis, in which only a few design variables are considered (i.e., the thickness or the size of the damping layer) [9,10]. However, these rely heavily on the designers’ intuition and it is hard to obtain the optimal configurations. These challenges are more notable when optimal microstructural damping configurations and macroscopic arrangements are simultaneously pursued.

Topology optimization (TO) [11,12] is a powerful inverse design technique that does not require predefined shapes. It can be used to generate a free-form optimal configuration that fulfills the functional requirements quantified by the objective functions and constraints. A series of TO methods have been developed to design damping composite structures, which can be broadly classified into two categories: one is to optimize the macrostructure layout of the damping material on the plates [13,14,15,16], while the other is focused on optimizing the composite architectures in microscale [17,18,19,20] using the homogenization method [21,22,23,24]. However, most existing works focus on either the macro- or micro-scale TO. Recent studies show that combining the macrostructure topology optimization with microscale composite material design can significantly improve structural performance. Zhu [25] proposed a concurrent TO strategy to optimize the layout of damping material and the beam size of the lattice core; however, they did not consider the microstructure design problems of the damping layer. Zhang [26] proposed a concurrent TO method to design the free-layer damping structures with a maximum structural modal loss factor. In addition to the damping performance, the vibration response of the structures controlled by dynamic stiffness is equally important. To the authors’ knowledge, so far, limited researches have focused on the multi-scale topology optimization of composite plate structures in a frequency range. In this case, dynamic compliance is often used as the design objective for vibration response design [27,28,29,30,31,32,33]. In these studies, dynamic compliance is calculated using proportional damping, which cannot accurately consider the variation of damping due to the change of damping material configurations.