Broadband elastic metamaterial with single negativity by mimicking lattice systems

The narrow bandwidth is a significant limitation of elastic metamaterials for practical engineering applications. In this paper, a broadband elastic metamaterial with single negativity (negative mass density or Young's modulus) is proposed by mimicking lattice systems. It has two stop bands and the bandwidth of the second one is infinite theoretically. The effect of the relevant parameters on band gaps is discussed. A continuum model is proposed and the selection of materials is discussed in detail. It shows that continuum metamaterials can be described accurately by using the lattice model, and the second stopband can be ultra-broad but not infinite. This discrepancy is investigated and a method is provided to calculate the upper limit of the second stopband for a continuum metamaterial. As a verification, the proposed metamaterial is used for wave mitigation over broadband frequency ranges. Moreover, the present method is extended to design 2D anisotropic elastic metamaterials, and a device to control the direction of elastic wave transmission is proposed as an example. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.