Numerical study on energy transmission for soft materials and metamaterials structures by structural intensity method

In this work, we studied the energy transmission and dynamic performance of multiple structures from the aspect of energy flow by using structure intensity (SI) method. Compared with the traditional vibration or dynamic analysis methods, the SI method considers the internal force and displacement in the structures, and can accurately reflect the effect of the excitation source, the damper or virtual damper locations and the energy flow on the structures. In this study, numerical simulation system was built to represent different structures under different loading and damping cases. We get the corresponding results of structural intensity distribution and plot the SI streamline for each case. We find that the structure intensity distribution can be significantly affected by adjusting the material parameters and setting damper in specific locations. Based on the SI energy distribution of the engineering materials, soft materials and metamaterials structures, we studied the methods to how to reduce the vibration of the structure or identify the potential damage positions by using its main energy propagation paths. In addition, the effect of structural damping on the energy flow transmission performance of metamaterials structures is discussed for swelling process. We hope that our works could provide researchers new ideas of vibration control for similar new smart structures in potential industry applications.