Novel Viscoelastic Metamaterial Vibration Isolator With Negative Poisson's Ratio Effect

Abstract In this work, we propose a multiscale damping design principle and design a novel negative Poisson's ratio viscoelastic metamaterial vibration isolator. First, we propose a comprehensive evaluation index for the multiscale damping mechanism of the negative Poisson's ratio viscoelastic metamaterials. The designed structure employs vulcanized butyl rubber (instead of unvulcanized rubber) as the intrinsic micrometer/nanometer scale damping source. Meanwhile, the concave–convex lens structure amplifies the mesoscale damping excitation effect. This multiscale synergistic approach significantly enhances the macroscopic damping performance of the metamaterial. Static analysis shows that the damping performance of the designed metamaterials decreases with the increase of the chord-height ratio, which is consistent with the proposed multiscale damping design principle. In order to verify the robustness and generality of this design principle, we systematically investigate the creep, vibration, and hysteresis properties of the negative Poisson's ratio viscoelastic metamaterials. These studies consistently show that the damping capacity of the negative Poisson's ratio metamaterials exhibits the same inverse relationship with the chord-height ratio, further confirming the validity and general applicability of our multiscale damping design principle. Finally, we fabricated optimized metamaterial vibration isolators and evaluated them by frequency scanning experiments. Comparative tests show that the developed vibration isolator reduces vibration propagation by 12.73 dB compared to a classical vibration isolator, making it an ideal solution for applications requiring superior vibration suppression performance.