Enhanced Vibration Isolation with Prestressed Resonant Auxetic Metamaterial

Metamaterials designate structures with properties exceeding bulk materials. Since the end of the 1990s, they have attracted ever-growing attention in many research fields such as electromagnetics, acoustics, and elastodynamics. This paper presents a numerical and experimental study on a locally resonant auxetic metamaterial for vibration isolation. The designed materials combine different mechanisms—such as buckling, local resonances, and auxetism—to generate enhanced isolation properties. This type of structure could help to improve the isolation for machines, transportation, and buildings. First, the static properties of the reference and resonant structures are compared. Dispersion curves are then analysed to describe their periodic dynamic behaviour. An experimental validation carried out on a specially designed test bench is then presented and compared to corresponding finite structure simulation. As a result, huge bandgaps are found for the resonant case and strong isolation properties are also confirmed by the experimental data.