Simulation and experimental investigation of low-frequency vibration reduction of honeycomb phononic crystals

The honeycomb phononic crystal displays good performance in reducing vibration, especially at low frequency, but there are few corresponding experiments involving this kind of phononic crystal and the influence of geometric parameters on the bandgap is unclear. We design a honeycomb phononic crystal, which is assembled by using a chemigum plate and a steel column, calculate the bandgaps of the phononic crystal, and analyze the vibration modes. In the experiment, we attach a same-sized rubber plate and a phononic crystal to a steel plate separately in order to compare their vibration reduction performances. We use 8 × 8 unit cells as a complete phononic crystal plate to imitate an infinite period structure and choose a string suspension arrangement to support the experiment. The results show that the honeycomb phononic crystal can reduce the vibrating plate magnitude by up to 60 dB in a frequency range of 600 Hz–900 Hz, while the rubber plate can reduce only about 20 dB. In addition, we study the effect of the thickness of plate and the height and the radius of the column in order to choose the most superior parameters to achieve low frequency and wide bandgap.