A ring metastructure vibration isolator with thin beams

Abstract

Conventional linear vibration isolators are difficult to have the function of high load-bearing capacity and low-frequency isolation, however nonlinear metastructure vibration isolators can effectively achieve this function. In this study, a new ring metastructure vibration isolator with thin beams was designed to have high static and low dynamic stiffnesses. We have accurately derived the static expression of these thin beams, obtained the stiffness characteristic and innovatively analyzed the vibration transmission characteristics of the ring isolator by deriving its dispersion equation. The influences of damping, frequency ratio, mass ratio, stiffness ratio, linear stiffness and nonlinear stiffness on the wave vector were obtained using the dispersion equation. Finally, a ring metastructure isolator sample with the high load-bearing capacity was designed and fabricated, and a vibration experiment was conducted to verify that the isolator has a lower vibration transmissibility in the target frequency band. This study not only demonstrates the feasibility of applying thin beams to nonlinear metastructure isolator design from mathematics, but also reveals profoundly its physical connotation from structural dynamics.