Mass-manufacturable metamaterials with passive and smart inclusions for broadband noise and vibration attenuation performance

An increasing awareness of the negative impact of noise and vibration exposure on our health along with ever tightening ecological and economic demands has led to an intensive search for innovative lightweight noise and vibration solutions. Metamaterials have emerged and shown strong potential to outperform traditional solutions. Although promising, the manufacturing of metamaterials is currently far from mature: current state-of-the-art approaches rely on ad-hoc or one-off realizations, while their sub-wavelength and often intricate inclusions pose significant challenges for mass-production. Moreover, their predominantly narrowband performance forms an important hurdle in view of becoming broadly applicable engineering solutions. The focus of this project is to create novel mass-manufacturable metamaterials with passive and smart inclusions for broadband noise and vibration attenuation performance. To reach this challenging goal, a new framework to create mass-manufacturable metamaterials will be developed which combines the mass-production capabilities of injection insert moulding with the high versatility of additive manufacturing to enable integrated complex passive and smart resonant inclusions. An efficient multi-physical metamaterial modeling framework will be developed and built upon to optimize the inclusion parameters and spatial configurations in order to achieve broadband vibro-acoustic performance, which will be validated on manufactured demonstrators.