Harnessing Buckling to Design Tunable Locally Resonant Acoustic Metamaterials

We report a new class of tunable and switchable acoustic metamaterials comprising resonating units dispersed into an elastic matrix. Each resonator consists of a metallic core connected to the elastomeric matrix through elastic beams, whose buckling is intentionally exploited as a novel and effective approach to control the propagation of elastic waves. We first use numerical analysis to show the evolution of the locally resonant band gap, fully accounting for the effect of nonlinear pre-deformation. Then, we experimentally measure the transmission of vibrations as a function of the applied loading in a finite-size sample and find excellent agreement with our numerical predictions. The proposed concept expands…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: CMMI-1120724, CMMI-1149456