Design and Experimental Validation of a Metacomposite Made of an Array of Piezopatches Shunted on Negative Capacitance Circuits for Vibroacoustic Control

In the last few decades, researchers have given a lot of attention to new engineered materials with the purpose of developing new technologies and devices such as mechanical filters, low frequency sound and vibration isolators, and acoustic waveguides. For instance, elastic phononic crystals may come to mind. They are materials with elastic or fluid inclusions inside a matrix made of an elastic solid. The anomalous behavior in phononic crystals arises from interference of waves propagating within an inhomogeneous material. The inclusions inside the matrix cause strong modifications of scattering properties. However, the application of phononic crystals is still limited to sonic frequencies. In fact, band gaps can be generated only when the acoustic wavelength is comparable to the distance between the inclusion. In order to overcome this limitation, a new class of metamaterial has been proposed: meta composite. This new class of material can modify the dynamics of the underlying structure using a bidimensional array of electromechanical transducers, which are composed by piezo patches connected to a synthetic negative capacitance. In this study, an application of the Floquet-Bloch theorem for vibroacoustic power flow optimization will be presented. In the context of periodically distributed, damped 2D mechanical systems, this numerical approach allows one to compute the multimodal waves dispersion curves into the entire first Brillouin zone. This approach also permits optimization of the piezoelectric shunting electrical impedance, which controls energy diffusion into the proposed semiactive distributed set of cells. Experiments performed on the examined structure illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed control method. The experiment requires a rectangular metallic plate equipped with seventyfive piezopatches, controlled independently by electronic circuits. More specifically, the out-of-plane displacements and the averaged kinetic energy of the controlled plate are compared in two different cases (control system on/off). The resulting data clearly show how this proposed technique is able to dampen and selectively reflect the incident waves.