Design and realization of a programmable nonlinear electroelastic metamaterial

Abstract

Metamaterials have gained attention in the recent years due to their capacity to achieve behaviour not encountered in conventional materials. These unnatural behaviour come from the periodic arrangement of substructures (cells or units), allowing this type of material to be used in Engineering applications to control electromagnetic and mechanical waves in several ways. However, more recently, researchers became interested in programmable metamaterials due to the possibility of controlling the constitutive properties of the material without the need of changing physical parts. This research project aims to design and realize a programmable and adaptive nonlinear electroelastic metamaterial that can be used for vibration or acoustics isolation. The constitutive parameters of such material, namely mass, stiffness and nonlinear coefficients, should be changeable through the use of periodically attached controllable or adaptive electrical impedances by using electromagnetic transducers rather than the common piezoelectric materials. The expected outcomes of this research project are new insights regarding analytic, numerical and experimental approaches for realizing nonlinear electromechanical metamaterial that paves the way for applications in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering problems. This research project is also linked to the ENVIBRO - Periodic Structure Design and Optimization for Enhanced Vibroacoustics Performance thematic project. (AU)