Design and analysis of ultrawide elastic metamaterial for three- dimensional vibration isolation

Abstract

Metamaterials are materials that are modified to bring in particular desired properties that are not inherited from original substance. Using number of techniques, materials can be engineered to have completely different electrical, optical, chemical or mechanical properties without changing it’s chemical compound. The focus of this thesis is to obtain a broadband elastic metamaterial that does not allow transmission of vibration at low frequencies in three dimensions. In order to achieve broadband vibration isolation at low frequencies, inertial amplification method is utilized. Various unit cell geometries are investigated and optimization studies are conducted to widen the vibration isolation frequency range. The optimized design is manufactured and tested. It is shown that the manufactured prototype has the widest band gap in three dimensions when all the three-dimensional elastic metamaterials and phononic crystals in the literature are considered.