A lattice (or 'grillage') of elastic Rayleigh rods (possessing a distributed mass density, together with rotational inertia) organized in a parallelepiped geometry can be axially loaded up to an arbitrary amount without distortion and then be subject to incremental time-harmonic dynamic motion. At certain threshold levels of axial load, the grillage manifests instabilities and displays non-trivial axial and flexural incremental vibrations. Including every possible structural geometry and for an arbitrary amount of axial stretching, Floquet-Bloch wave asymptotics is used to homogenize the in-plane mechanical response, so to obtain an equivalent prestressed elastic solid subject to incremental time-harmonic vibration, which includes, as a particular case, the incremental quasi-static response. The equivalent elastic solid is obtained from its acoustic tensor, directly derived from homogenization and shown to be independent of the rods' rotational inertia. Loss of strong ellipticity in the equivalent continuum coincides with macrobifurcation in the lattice, while micro-bifurcation remains undetected in the continuum and corresponds to a vibration of vanishing frequency of the lowest dispersion branch of the lattice, occurring at finite wavelength. Dynamic homogenization reveals the structure of the acoustic branches close to ellipticity loss and the analysis of forced vibrations (both in physical space and Fourier space) shows low-frequency wave localizations. A perturbative approach based on dynamic Green's function is applied to both the lattice and its equivalent continuum. This shows that only macro-instability corresponds to localization of incremental strain, while micro-instabilities occur in modes which spread throughout the whole lattice with an 'explosive' character. In particular, extremely localized mechanical responses are found both in the lattice and in the solid, with the advantage that the former can be easily realized, for instance via 3D printing. In this way, features such as shear band inclination, or the emergence of a single shear band, or competition between micro and macro instabilities become all designable features. The comparison between the mechanics of the lattice and its equivalent solid shows that the homogenization technique allows an almost perfect representation, except when micro-bifurcation is the first manifestation of instability. Therefore, the presented results pave the way for the design of architected cellular materials to be used in applications where extreme deformations are involved.

In-plane wave propagation in a periodic rectangular grid beam structure, which includes rotational inertia (so-called 'Rayleigh beams'), is analyzed both with a Floquet-Bloch exact formulation for free oscillations and with a numerical treatment (developed with PML absorbing boundary conditions) for forced vibrations (including Fourier representation and energy flux evaluations), induced by a concentrated force or moment. A complex interplay is observed between axial and flexural vibrations (not found in the common idealization of out-of-plane motion), giving rise to several forms of vibration localization: 'X-', 'cross-' and 'star-' shaped, and channel propagation. These localizations are triggered by several factors, including rotational inertia and slenderness of the beams and the type of forcing source (concentrated force or moment). Although the considered grid of beams introduces an orthotropy in the mechanical response, a surprising 'isotropization' of the vibration is observed at special frequencies. Moreover, rotational inertia is shown to 'sharpen' degeneracies related to Dirac cones (which become more pronounced when the aspect ratio of the grid is increased), while the slenderness can be tuned to achieve a perfectly flat band in the dispersion diagram. The obtained results can be exploited in the realization of metamaterials designed to control wave propagation. and the solution techniques are well-known, many interesting features still remain to be explored. This exploration is provided in the present article, where an exact Floquet-Bloch analysis is performed and complemented with a numerical treatment of the forced vibrations induced by the application of a concentrated force or moment, including presentation of the Fourier transform and energy flow (treated in [26] for free vibrations). It is shown that (i.) aspect ratio of the grid, (ii.) slenderness and (iii.) rotational inertia of the beams decide the emergence of several forms of highly-localized waveforms, namely, 'channel propagation', 'X-', 'cross-', 'star-' shaped vibration modes. Moreover, these mechanical properties of the grid can be designed to obtain flat bands and degeneracies related to Dirac cones in the dispersion diagram and directional anisotropy or, surprisingly, dynamic 'isotropization', for which waves propagate in a square lattice with the polar symmetry characterizing propagation in an isotropic medium.The presented results open the way to the design of vibrating devices with engineered properties, to achieve control of elastic wave propagation.2 In-plane Floquet-Bloch waves in a rectangular grid of beams An infinite lattice of Rayleigh beams is considered, periodically arranged in a rectangular geometry as shown in Fig. 1a, together with the unit cell, Fig. 1b.

The quest for wave channeling and manipulation has driven a strong research effort on topological and architected materials, capable of propagating localized electromagnetical or mechanical signals. With reference to an elastic structural grid, which elements can sustain both axial and flexural deformations, it is shown that material interfaces can be created with structural properties tuned by prestress states to achieve total reflection, negative refraction, and strongly localized signal channeling. The achievement of a flat lens and topologically localized modes is demonstrated and tunability of the system allows these properties to hold for a broad range of wavelengths. An ingredient to obtain these effects is the use, suggested here and never attempted before, of concentrated pulsating moments. The important aspect of the proposed method is that states of prestress can be easily removed or changed to tune with continuity the propagational characteristics of the medium, so that a new use of vibration channeling and manipulation is envisaged for elastic materials.

Homogenization of the incremental response of grids made up of preloaded elastic rods leads to homogeneous effective continua which may suffer macroscopic instability, occurring at the same time in both the grid and the effective continuum. This instability corresponds to the loss of ellipticity in the effective material and the formation of localized responses as, for instance, shear bands. Using lattice models of elastic rods, loss of ellipticity has always been found to occur for stress states involving compression of the rods, as usually these structural elements buckle only under compression. In this way, the locus of material stability for the effective solid is unbounded in tension, i.e. the material is always stable for a tensile prestress. A rigorous application of homogenization theory is proposed to show that the inclusion of sliders (constraints imposing axial and rotational continuity, but allowing shear jumps) in the grid of rods leads to loss of ellipticity in tension so that the locus for material instability becomes bounded . This result explains (i) how to design elastic materials subject to localization of deformation and shear banding for all radial stress paths; and (ii) how for all these paths a material may fail by developing strain localization and without involving cracking. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Wave generation and transmission in multi-scale complex media and structured metamaterials (part 1)’.

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