Band Gap Control in an Active Elastic Metamaterial With Negative Capacitance Piezoelectric Shunting

Elastic metamaterials have been extensively investigated due to their significant effects on controlling propagation of elastic waves. One of the most interesting properties is the generation of band gaps, in which subwavelength elastic waves cannot propagate through. In the study, a new class of active elastic metamaterials with negative capacitance piezoelectric shunting is presented. We first investigated dispersion curves and band gap control of an active mass-in-mass lattice system. The unit cell of the mass-in-mass lattice system consists of the inner masses connected by active linear springs to represent negative capacitance piezoelectric shunting. It was demonstrated that the band gaps can be actively controlled and tuned by varying effective stiffness constant of the linear spring through appropriately selecting the value of negative capacitance. The promising application was then demonstrated in the active elastic metamaterial plate integrated with the negative capacitance shunted piezoelectric patches for band gap control of both the longitudinal and bending waves. It can be found that the location and the extent of the induced band gap of the elastic metamaterial can be effectively tuned by using shunted piezoelectric patch with different values of negative capacitance, especially for extremely low-frequency cases.