Lightweight Vibration Absorption using Buckling Metamaterials

Obiettivo

Vibrations cause unwanted noise and even failure in many areas, including vehicles such as spacecrafts, road vehicles and trains, sensitive optical or high-tech instruments and machinery. The market size for global vibration control systems was valued at 4.7 billion dollars in 2021 and is expected to expand to 8.1 billion dollars in 20302. This increase in demand is driven by a growing emphasis on the mechanical stability and balancing of industrial machines, which require ever growing precision and vehicles, which require ever growing safety.

To counter these vibrations, many strategies have been developed. One of the easiest ways is to use viscoelastic materials, but there is typically an inherent trade-off: high dissipation entails low stiffness, whereas many applications typically require both high dissipation and high specific stiffness. Another approach is to use active vibration damping, but these systems typically add an additional layer of complexity and weight.

Here, we propose to use Euler buckling as a functional mechanism to create vibrations absorbers. Buckling structures are simultaneously stiff and highly dissipative thanks to their high stiffness prior to buckling and highly nonlinear force and damping response during post-buckling. To this end, we will use flexible mechanical metamaterials made of metal and fibre-reinforced composites with tailored buckling and post-buckling. We will establish such metamaterials as a prime avenue to create lightweight structures that is orders of magnitude more dissipative than their linear viscoelastic counterparts. We will hence establish their potential as a competitive solution for lightweight structures combining high damping and high specific stiffness in high-tech and aerospace applications. In particular, our metamaterials will allow to reduce the weight and increase the damping of energy-absorbing components in vehicles, hence reducing their overall weight.