Soft and disordered hyperuniform elastic metamaterials for highly efficient vibration concentration

Vibrations, which widely exist throughout the world, could be a nearly endless and locally obtained green energy source. It has been a long-standing challenge to efficiently utilize dispersed vibration energy, especially within the high-frequency range, since the amplitudes of high-frequency vibrations in local parts of objects are relatively weak. Here, for the first time, we propose a soft and disordered hyperuniform elastic metamaterial (DHEM), achieving a remarkable concentration of vibrations in broad frequency bands by a maximum enhancement factor of similar to 4000 at 1930 Hz. The DHEM, with rational sizes from similar to 1 cm to similar to 1000 cm, covers a broad range of frequencies from similar to 10 Hz to similar to 10 kHz, which are emitted by many vibration sources including domestic appliances, factories and transportation systems, for example. Moreover, the performance of the soft DHEM under deformation is validated, enabling conformal attachments on uneven objects. Our findings lay the groundwork for reducing traditional energy consumption by recovering some of the energy dissipated by devices in the working world. This paper presents a novel soft metamaterial design for concentrating vibration with an enhancement factor of similar to 4000 by putting the disordered scatterers with a power-law curved edge in soft materials.

Automated summary

This paper introduces a novel soft and disordered hyperuniform elastic metamaterial (DHEM) that can efficiently concentrate vibration energy in a wide frequency range. The DHEM has rational sizes and can be applied to various vibration sources. It also demonstrates good performance under deformation, enabling attachments on uneven objects.