Numerical and experimental investigations on the band-gap characteristics of metamaterial multi-span beams

Highlights: • A novel metamaterial multi-span beam is designed and investigated. • Accuracy and feasibility of this work are verified by the FEM and experiments. • Band-gap coupling effect can be achieved by properly choosing the parameters. • Band-gap widths are increased and vibration reduction performance is highly improved. -- Abstract: A novel metamaterial multi-span beam with periodic simple supports and local resonators is designed and investigated. The frequency responses of the proposed metamaterial multi-span beam are computed by the spectral element method (SEM). The accuracy and feasibility of the SEM are verified by the finite element method (FEM) and the vibration experiments. The results show that the metamaterial multi-span beam could generate both the local resonance band-gaps in the low-frequency ranges and the Bragg band-gaps in the medium and high frequency regions. By adjusting the natural frequencies of the local resonators, the thickness of the base beam and the length of the unit-cell, the local resonance and the Bragg band-gaps can be controlled, respectively. The coupling effects of these two kinds of band-gaps are investigated by the parametrical design, which broadens the band-gaps and consequently improves the vibration reduction performance.