In order to design phononic crystals whose band-gaps are located in low-frequency ranges, researchers commonly adopt low stiffness polymeric materials as key constituents and exploit the high impedance mismatch between metals and polymers. However, there has been very little research on wave propagation at arbitrary angles in the sagittal plane of viscoelastic-elastic multilayered composites because there exist the intricate wave attenuation characteristics at the layer interfaces. The objective of our investigation is to obtain analytical dispersion relation for oblique wave motion in the sagittal plane of infinitely periodic multilayered composite composed of alternating viscoelastic and elastic solids, where the attenuation of harmonic plane waves is found to occur only in the direction perpendicular to the layers. By using this wave propagation characteristic, we directly apply the semi-analytical approach employed in elastic multilayered composites to calculate the dispersion relation of sagittal plane waves in alternating viscoelastic-elastic multilayered composites. Specifically, we consider a bilayered composite composed of alternating aluminum and polyurethane elastomer, whose complex-valued viscoelastic moduli are experimentally determined by performing dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA). The analysis shows that the alternating viscoelastic-elastic layered composite does not possess a phononic band-gap regardless of incident angles. In addition, wave motions at oblique angles are found to travel with a wide range of frequency contents compared to wave motions perpendicular to the layers. The presented analysis demonstrates that wave dispersion relation in viscoelastic-elastic layered composites is distinctly different from the corresponding elastic counterpart, and highlights the importance of the viscoelastic modeling of polymeric materials in wave dispersion analysis.

Metamaterials (MMs) are composites that are artificially engineered to have unconventional mechanical properties that stem from their microstructural geometry rather than from their chemical composition. Several studies have shown the effectiveness of viscoelastic MMs in vibration attenuation due to their inherent vibration dissipation properties and the Bragg scattering effect. This study presents a multiobjective optimization based on genetic algorithms (GA) that aims to find a viscoelastic MM crystal with the highest vibration attenuation in a chosen low-frequency range. A multiobjective optimization allows considering the attenuation due to the MM inertia versus the Bragg scattering effect resulting from the periodicity of the MM. The investigated parameters that influence wave transmission in a one-dimensional (1D) MM crystal included the lattice constant, the number of cells and the layers’ thickness. Experimental testing and finite element analysis were used to support the optimization procedure. An electrodynamic shaker was used to measure the vibration transmission of the three control specimens and the optimal specimen in the frequency range 1–1200[Formula: see text]Hz. The test results demonstrated that the optimized specimen provides better vibration attenuation than the control specimens by both having a band-gap starting at a lower frequency and having less transmission at its passband.

The finite element (FE) method offers an efficient framework to investigate the evolution of phononic crystals which possess materials or geometric nonlinearity subject to external loading. Despite its superior efficiency, the FE method suffers from spectral distortions in the dispersion analysis of waves perpendicular to the layers in infinitely periodic multilayered composites. In this study, the analytical dispersion relation for sagittal elastic waves is reformulated in a substantially concise form, and it is employed to reproduce spatial aliasing-induced spectral distortions in FE dispersion relations. Furthermore, through an anti-aliasing condition and the effective elastic modulus theory, an FE modeling general guideline is provided to overcome the observed spectral distortions in FE dispersion relations of infinitely periodic multilayered composites, and its validity is also demonstrated.

Phononic crystals (PCs) have the ability to have phononic bandgaps dependent on the acoustic properties of its constituent materials (i.e., mass, elasticity). Forming a 1D periodic variation using a viscoelastic material allow the PC to have more wave vibration attenuation in the longitudinal direction. In this study, the low transmission zones and the vibration attenuation properties of a one-dimensional PC subjected to flexural vibration was evaluated experimentally. Results were presented in the form of frequency response functions and showed the flexural low-frequency zones starting at 500 Hz with three zones in the 16kHz range.

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