Investigation on vibration properties of 3D printed lattice structures filled with tin–bismuth alloy

Abstract

Optimal design of structures with respect to vibration attenuation property is essential and basically required in many structural engineering concepts. A new type of metastructure composed of periodic lattices and embedded resonators is proposed for vibration suppression. The lightweight periodic lattice structure, which combines body-centered cubic and face-centered cubic structural configurations, is fabricated by selective laser melting with AlSi10Mg. Furthermore, the lattice structures periodically filled with the tin–bismuth alloy, which has a high density and a low melting point, can be used as local resonators to open bandgap in a metastructure. Experiments and numerical simulations are conducted to investigate the bandgap characteristics and vibration damping behavior of the proposed metastructure. The results of the simulation and the experiment data agree satisfactorily. It is demonstrated that the proposed structure can generate a complete bandgap in the low-frequency range, which is useful for machining vibration suppression. To optimize the structure, the influence of structural parameters on the vibration dispersion effect is further studied. The bandgap position and bandwidth can be flexibly adjusted by varying structure parameters, i.e., the radii of the external frames, the spatial scale factor of the metastructure, and the filling fraction of the resonator. This study provides a new possibility for metastructure with a low-frequency bandgap by filling the lattice structures with tin–bismuth alloy.