An Inertant Elastic Metamaterial Plate With Extra Wide Low-Frequency Flexural Band Gaps

Arranging inerter arrays in designing metamaterials can achieve low-frequency vibration suppression even with a small configuration mass. In this work, we investigate flexural wave bandgap properties of an elastic metamaterial plate with periodic arrays of inerter-based dynamic vibration absorbers (IDVAs). By extending the plane wave expansion (PWE) method, the inertant elastic metamaterial plate is explicitly formulated in which the interactions of the attached IDVAs and the host plate are considered. Due to the additional degree-of-freedom induced by each IDVA, multiple band gaps are obtained. Along the ΓX direction, the inertant elastic metamaterial plate exhibits two locally resonant (LR) band gaps and one Bragg (BG) band gap. In contrast, along the ΓM direction, two adjacent LR band gaps are obtained. Detailed parametric analyses are conducted to investigate the relationships between the flexural wave bandgap properties and the structural inertant parameters. With a dissipative mechanism added to the IDVAs, extremely wide band gaps in different directions can be further generated. Finally, by adopting an effective added mass technique in the finite element method, displacement transmission and vibration modes of a finite inertant elastic metamaterial plate are obtained. Our investigation indicates that the proposed inertant elastic metamaterial plate has extra-wide low-frequency flexural band gaps and therefore has potential applications in engineering vibration prohibition.