Funded Projects

Traditional methods for building protection against earthquakes are largely based on seismic isolators and energy dampers integrated in the lateral load resisting frame of the structure. While an effective “damage control” solution, the conventional approach fails to intercept and attenuate incident seismic waves before they reach the structure. Furthermore, materials with strong dissipative properties naturally exhibit below-average stiffness; bringing up inevitable trade-offs in strength and load-bearing capabilities. This project seeks to investigate the use of a class of artificially architected or engineered materials, or metamaterials, to address both of these challenges. The metamaterials will be inserted in foundation soil with the goal of constructing a vibrational shield around a given building or structural development. The internal structure and topology of metamaterials can be tailored at the macroscopic level to elicit an unconventional mechanical response to external loading and excitations. Such features culminate in damping-free vibroacoustic mitigation properties which cannot otherwise be achieved using natural and commonly available isotropic structures. Specifically, we will exploit the unique wave filtering and dispersion behavior of elastic metamaterials to mitigate seismic waves at band gap frequencies of interest. The project will further seek to simultaneously adapt and tune the metamaterial design to the accompanying geotechnical factors, including soil characteristics and in situ conditions, earthquake source, and nature of the destructive seismic waves. As such, the collaborative trio (cT) comprises complementary expertise in vibrations and acoustics, structural and earthquake engineering, as well as geomechanics.