A Review: Elastic Metamaterials and Inverse Design Methods for Shock and Vibration Mitigation

The development of engineering technology puts forward more demanding requirements for the performance of materials, many of which cannot be met by the existing natural materials. In addition to exploring and refining new natural materials, it is possible to arrange designed microstructures according to periodicity or other rules to produce man-made materials that do not exist in nature itself, mostly due to the development of additive manufacturing (AM) technology. These artificial materials are known as metamaterials. In the past few years, the design and application of metamaterials have made great progress. This paper reviews the research of elastic metamaterials in recent years, which includes both traditional metamaterials with fixed structural properties and active metamaterials with tunable properties. Among many application scenarios, this paper mainly focuses on elastic metamaterials’ applications in vibration control, impact mitigation and wave attenuation. In addition, this paper also discusses the development of metamaterial inverse design or optimization design, with special attention to the application of topology optimization (TO) technology in this area.