Dynamic Simulation of a Metamaterial Beam Consisting of Tunable Shape Memory Material Absorbers

Abstract

Metamaterials are materials with an artificially tailored internal structure and unusual physical and mechanical properties such as a negative refraction coefficient, negative mass inertia, and negative modulus of elasticity, etc. Due to their unique characteristics, metamaterials possess great potential in engineering applications. This study aims to develop new acoustic metamaterials for applications in semi-active vibration isolation. For the proposed state-of-the-art structural configurations in metamaterials, the geometry and mass distribution of the crafted internal structure is employed to induce the local resonance inside the material. Therefore, a stopband in the dispersion curve can be created because of the energy gap. For conventional metamaterials, the stopband is fixed and unable to be adjusted in real-time once the design is completed. Although the metamaterial with distributed resonance characteristics has been proposed in the literature to extend its working stopband, the efficacy is usually compromised. In order to increase its adaptability to time-varying disturbance, several semi-active metamaterials have been proposed. In this study, the incorporation of a tunable shape memory alloy (SMA) into the configuration of metamaterial is proposed. The repeated resonance unit consisting of SMA beams is designed and its theoretical formulation for determining the dynamic characteristics is established. For more general application, the finite element model of this smart metamaterial is also derived and simulated. The stopband of this metamaterial beam with different configurations in the arrangement of the SMA absorbers was investigated. The result shows that the proposed model is able to predict the unique dynamic characteristics of this smart metamaterial beam. Moreover, the tunable stopband of the metamaterial beam with controlling the state of SMA absorbers was also demonstrated.