Architected materials with meso-scale interactions for noise and vibration control – ArchiNoise

Noise vibration and harshness (NVH) have an impact on many industries (e.g. Transportation, aerospace, production, civil engineering). NVH affects human health, reduces the lifetime of engineering systems and leads to structural overdesign and increased carbon emissions.

Despite a fast-growing literature on innovative NVH mitigation materials, the overall vibro-acoustic performances of latest concepts seem to be plateauing, when confronted with current technological constraints on cost, compactness, accuracy, adaptability and structural integrity, to name a few.

ArchiNoise intends to revisit the conceptual paradigm within which these innovative material designs are derived. It will therefore explore out-of-the-box architected meta-structures at meso- and macroscopic scales, able to overcome some of their fundamental limits in terms of structural and vibro-acoustic performance.

To bring such original meta-structures into life, ArchiNoise will transpose some nano-scale concepts - originating from the smaller scales of physics and electro-magnetism, into the macroscopic structural engineering world. This will result in a number of scattering effects similar to Bragg and locally resonant bandgaps, except that these will no longer depend on the dimensions of a chosen periodic unit-cell or the mass of any harmonic oscillator.

These unusual - and sometimes staggering - waveguiding phenomena could have potentially groundbreaking impact on broadband NVH mitigation and customization capabilities, if properly harnessed. ArchiNoise will therefore develop a comprehensive set of theoretical, computational and phenomenological methodologies able to understand, design, harness then evaluate these meso-scale architected materials.

By implementing a cross-disciplinary approach, ranging from enriched continuum theories, structural mechanics, vibroacoustics, inverse wave-based identification and developing an innovative lattice-based design philosophy with periodic modelling strategy, ArchiNoise will navigate an uncharted path to lightweight NVH material solutions.