A locally resonant metamaterial and its application in vibration isolation: Experimental and numerical investigations

Vibration isolation metamaterial barrier has been extensively studied in mitigating the damage induced by vibration, while a deeper understanding of the vibration isolation characteristics based on laboratory experiments is still lacking. In this work, a locally resonant metamaterial barrier is proposed, and a large-scale laboratory experiment was first designed to investigate the isolation mechanism of the proposed metamaterial barrier. The metamaterial vibration isolation barrier is assembled by arraying 5 x 5 resonators. To better explain the observations in experiments and unveil the underlying isolation mechanism, COMSOL Multiphysics was also employed to simulate the laboratory experiment. Subsequently, the vibration isolation effect is quantitatively analyzed by analyzing the acceleration amplitude reduction spectrum (ARS) of the ground surface. The vibration isolation mechanism is discussed by monitoring the acceleration field around the metamaterial barrier. The results indicate that two significant locally resonant attenuation domains are observed, which are induced by the first-order and second-order vertical resonance frequencies of the metamaterial. Another experimental scheme that simultaneously monitored the acceleration of the mass block and the bottom of resonators was implemented to investigate vibration in the resonator. The vibration energy distribution on the mass block and the bottom of the resonator is found to depend significantly on the vibration frequency. When the frequency is lower than a certain frequency, the locally resonant is dominant. Otherwise, the geometric scattering is dominant. The vibration isolation mechanism of the locally resonance metamaterial was investigated by laboratory experiments and provided an effective solving path for isolating the low-frequency vibration.