Design and low-velocity impact behavior of an origami-bellow foldcore honeycomb acoustic metastructure

Abstract

The ancient art of origami has inspired the design and fabrication of numerous acoustic and energy-absorption mechanical metamaterials and metastructures. This study introduces an origami-inspired honeycomb acoustic metastructure designed for engineering applications that demand both high impact resistance and effective sound absorption. This acoustic metastructure is formed by bonding a panel containing periodically distributed perforated holes and a panel without perforations to a periodical array of trapezoidal origami-bellow units. Acoustic wave propagation and drop-weight impact simulations are conducted to investigate the acoustic performance and low-velocity impact behavior of the metastructure. The results show that the origami-bellow honeycomb structure exhibits superior sound absorption capacity over two frequency ranges, outperforming the conventional honeycomb-core sandwich structure. Furthermore, it is shown that, in comparison with both the conventional hexagonal honeycomb-core and the Miura-ori foldcore sandwich structures, the proposed acoustic metastructure demonstrates higher levels of impact resistance and energy absorption capacity. We also show that the mechanical performance of the introduced metastructure under low-velocity impact loads can be further enhanced by increasing the story height of the origami-bellow units. Besides, the matrix material of the origami foldcore can be tailored to suit various scenarios, providing noise control and collision robustness for a diverse range of engineering applications.