Theoretical seminar | 17 February 2021

Acoustic metamaterials are natural or synthetic systems with internal microstructure, permitting resonant interaction between long waves and local nonlinear oscillations, allowing various applications as sensors, noise absorbers, etc. Fine characterization of the performance of such systems, in view of possibly-chaotic dynamics, requires specialized theoretical modeling tools, such as establishing of simplified geometric models, asymptotic methods of qualitative analysis and stable numerical integration schemes. The present talk summarizes some of such tools, developed for computational characterization of acoustic metamaterials, focusing on 1D mechanical chains having structural degeneracies (or topological features) such as a flat dispersion bands in the linear spectrum, vanishing-mass elements and non-smooth constitutive response.