Energy-Absorption and Vibration-Attenuation Design Using Shell-Based Mechanical Metamaterials

Abstract:

Explosion and impact loadings pose a serious threat to the service safety of defense and industrial equipment. Energy-absorbing materials can effectively reduce structural vibration and the damage caused by impact. Traditional energy-absorbing materials， such as aluminum foam， have a relatively limited design space. Therefore， it is urgent to develop new energy-absorbing materials. In this paper， the energy-absorbing mechanism of porous materials was systematically investigated based on numerical modelling of the impact process. The simulation results indicate that energy-absorbing materials can have a good shock absorption performance only when the strength is appropriate. In order to realize customized design of energy-absorbing materials， shell-based mechanical metamaterials with different energy-absorbing characteristics were designed based on the machine learning and genetic algorithm. The effectiveness of the newly designed metamaterials in energy-absorption and vibration-attenuation was verified through simulation results. This study can provide important technical guidelines for the design and optimization of new energy-absorbing materials.