Flexural wave propagation and vibration isolation characteristics of sandwich plate-type elastic metamaterials

Sandwich structures are widely used in the fields of aerospace, automobile as well as ship and offshore structures because of their excellent mechanical performances such as lightweight, high specific strength and high specific stiffness. In this study, the flexural wave band gaps and vibration isolation characteristics of sandwich plate-type elastic metamaterials are numerically and experimentally investigated. The proposed sandwich plate-type elastic metamaterials are constituted of local resonant stubs periodically deposited on a sandwich plate with periodic thin-wall aluminium tube cores. An efficient finite element method combined with a solid-shell coupling method and Bloch periodic boundary conditions is presented and validated by experimental measurements to calculate the dispersion relations and the acceleration frequency responses of sandwich plate-type elastic metamaterials. The influences of geometric parameters on the flexural wave band gaps are performed and discussed. Results show that the proposed sandwich plate-type elastic metamaterials can yield flexural wave band gaps in the low-frequency range and show significant performance on the flexural vibration isolation. Moreover, the flexural wave band gaps can be effectively modulated by the geometric parameters.