Correlated disorder in rainbow metamaterials for vibration attenuation

Abstract

Metastructures are typically composed of periodic unit cells designed to present enhanced dynamic properties in which either single or multiple resonators are periodically distributed. Even though the periodic metamaterials can obtain bandgaps with outstanding vibration attenuation, the widths of bandgaps can still be narrow for some practical applications. Rainbow metamaterials have been proposed based on gradient or random profiles to provide further improved attenuation. Nonetheless, the effects of correlated random disorder on their attenuation performance remains an open challenge. This work presents an investigation on the effects of correlated disorder on the vibration attenuation of rainbow metamaterials. An analytical model using the transfer matrix approach is used to calculate the receptance functions in a finite length metastructure composed of evenly spaced non-symmetric resonators attached to a beam with Π-shaped cross-section, thus a multi-frequency metastructure. The correlated disorder is modelled using random fields and an analytical expression of the Karhunen-Loève expansion is used such that spatial correlation on the resonator properties is modified by various correlation lengths, i.e., the level of spatial smoothness. Individual samples of random fields are used to investigate the effects of the correlated disorder in the vibration attenuation of a multi-frequency metastructure. It is shown that the bandgap can be further widened when compared to uncorrelated disorder. The obtained results indicates that a combination of the gradient profile with some level of disorder, typically resulting from random fields with larger correlation lengths, tends to give improved vibration attenuation when compared to a optimized gradient rainbow metamaterial. It opens new and innovative ways for the design of broadband rainbow metastructures for vibration attenuation.