Nonlinear Energy Sink Metamaterial Approaches for Flow-Induced Vibration Attenuation

2026-07-22

Flow-induced vibration can occur in many engineering systems and structures such as bridges, transmission lines, aircraft control surfaces, offshore structures, marine cables, and other hydrodynamic applications. A novel approach to attenuate such vibrations could be the application of mechanical metamaterials, which are artificial engineering materials having unique elastic wave propagation properties based on the existence of stop and pass bands originating from the material or geometric periodicity. Nonlinear energy sinks are having a wider frequency band of vibration attenuation than linear vibration absorbers due to strong nonlinear stiffness. This project aims at taking the functionality of metamaterials to the next level by performing the design, modeling and experimental aspects of advanced materials research by combining the features of a hysteretic nonlinear energy sink, energy harvesting, dissipation effects and tuning of metamaterial properties based on magnetorheological composite in the metamaterial subunit design. This, in turn, will give rise to a novel class of semi-active magnetorheologically tuned metamaterials (MTMs) for flow-induced wing flutter and pipeline vibration control using linear and nonlinear approaches for bandgap forming, vibration attenuation, and energy harvesting. The computational framework based on numerical and semi-numerical methods together with pseudo-arc continuation techniques will be developed to discover dispersion characteristics of linear models, and frequency-responses and bifurcation points of nonlinear models. Novel 3D printing techniques will be developed for the fabrication of MTMs with magnetorheological composite. Experiments will serve to validate mathematical models and identify parameters of the nonlinear MTM models for the purpose of numerical simulations. Optimization procedures will be carried out to maximize the efficiency of developed metamaterials for flutter and pipeline vibration control.

United Kingdom (UK)

2026-02-15