Wave attenuation and trapping in 3D printed cantilever-in-mass metamaterials with spatially correlated variability.

Additive manufacturing has become a fundamental tool to fabricate and experimentally investigate mechanical metamaterials and phononic crystals. However, this manufacturing process produces spatially correlated variability that breaks the translational periodicity, which might compromise the wave propagation performance of metamaterials. We demonstrate that the vibration attenuation profile is strictly related to the spatial profile of the variability, and that there exists an optimal disorder degree below which the attenuation bandwidth widens; for high disorder levels, the band gap mistuning annihilates the overall attenuation. The variability also induces a spatially variant locally resonant band gap that progressively slow down the group velocity until an almost zero value, giving rise to wave trapping effect near the lower band gap boundary. Inspired by this wave trapping phenomenon, a rainbow metamaterial with linear spatial-frequency trapping is also proposed, which have potential applications in energy harvesting, spatial wave filtering and non-destructive evaluation at low frequency. This report provides a deeper understanding of the differences between numerical simulations using nominal designed properties and experimental analysis of metamaterials constructed in 3D printing. These analysis and results may extend to phononic crystals and other periodic systems to investigate their wave and dynamic performance as well as robustness under variability.