Piezoelectric Metamaterial with Self-Tuning Resonant Shunt Circuits

The bandgap generated in piezoelectric metamaterials with resonant shunt circuits unveils a great potential for vibration control. This paper presents a piezoelectric metamaterial with the capability of broadband vibration attenuation by adaptive bandgap tuning. Unlike the widely used synthetic impedance circuit, a self-tuning resonant shunt circuit by integrating a microcontroller-driven digital potentiometer into the synthetic inductor circuit is developed to achieve the bandgap adjustment of the piezoelectric metamaterial. Specifically, the excitation frequency is detected by the microcontroller, and the synthetic inductance in the resonant shunt circuit is adjusted in real-time based on a given criterion. An experimental study is conducted to demonstrate the dynamic behavior and vibration suppression performance of the developed piezoelectric metamaterial. The results confirm that the self-tuning resonant shunt circuit can rapidly respond to frequency-varying vibration sources and endow the piezoelectric metamaterial with an extremely wide vibration attenuation region.