Issue 42, 2023

Nature-inspired designs for disordered acoustic bandgap materials

Abstract

We introduce an amorphous mechanical metamaterial inspired by how cells pack in biological tissues. The spatial heterogeneity in the local stiffness of these materials has been recently shown to impact the mechanics of confluent biological tissues and cancer tumor invasion. Here we use this bio-inspired structure as a design template to construct mechanical metamaterials and show that this heterogeneity can give rise to amorphous cellular solids with large, tunable acoustic bandgaps. Unlike acoustic crystals with periodic structures, the bandgaps here are directionally isotropic and robust to defects due to their complete lack of positional order. Possible ways to manipulate bandgaps are explored with a combination of the tissue-level elastic modulus and local stiffness heterogeneity of cells. To further demonstrate the existence of bandgaps, we dynamically perturb the system with an external sinusoidal wave in the perpendicular and horizontal directions. The transmission coefficients are calculated and show valleys that coincide with the location of bandgaps. Experimentally this design should lead to the engineering of self-assembled rigid acoustic structures with full bandgaps that can be controlled via mechanical tuning and promote applications in a broad area from vibration isolations to mechanical waveguides.

Graphical abstract: Nature-inspired designs for disordered acoustic bandgap materials

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
29 Mar 2023
Accepted
04 Oct 2023
First published
11 Oct 2023

Soft Matter, 2023,19, 8221-8227

Author version available

Nature-inspired designs for disordered acoustic bandgap materials

X. Li and D. Bi, Soft Matter, 2023, 19, 8221 DOI: 10.1039/D3SM00419H

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