Elastic metamaterial with hexagonal prism inclusion for flexural vibration control of a thin plate structure

In this study, the application of elastic metamaterial for suppressing flexural vibration of a thin plate structures is investigated. An elastic metamaterial with hexagonal prism inclusion is proposed and through a parametric study, the effect of the design parameters on bandgap properties are presented and it is found that the tuning of the geometrical structure of the elastic metamaterial unit cell can effectively tune the bandgap location to address a particular frequency range of interest. In contrast to the previous studies that only consider the bandgap property of elastic metamaterial, in this work, the flexural bandgap of the metamaterial when attached to a thin plate structure is investigated by numerical simulation. It is found that when applied to a thin plate structure, the proposed metamaterial can form a low frequency flexural bandgap, and the adjustment of the parameters can effectively influence the bandgap properties. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed elastic metamaterial in flexural vibration control for thin plate structures.