Ground vibration reduction by multimodal locally resonant seismic metasurfaces
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Ground vibration induced by railway traffic may cause disturbance to sensitive equipment and annoyance to people. Inspired by promising results obtained with seismic metamaterials to protect civil structures [1], we investigate how seismic metamaterials mitigate railway induced vibration (1 – 80 Hz). The effectiveness of arrays of resonators composed of simple mass-spring systems on the ground surface is widely studied [2]. Their performance is limited as only their vertical motion affects the surface waves. We propose a novel design of multimodal locally resonant arrays of resonators to mitigate environmental ground vibration in a wide frequency range. A 3D finite element - boundary element (FE-BE) formulation is used for modeling the interaction of the metasurface with the soil. The resonator comprises three separated masses connected by elastic beams to a rigid cylinder. A tuning of the resonance frequencies is performed in order to obtain broadband vibration mitigation. The resonators are excited by incident wave fields generated by fixed and moving loads on homogeneous and layered soils. Broadband vibration mitigation is obtained by using the classical metawedge, an array of resonators with graded eigenfrequency in the x-direction. A parametric study is performed in order to find the best configuration on a trade-off between attenuation and the affected frequency band. The graded metasurface evokes a band gap between 30 Hz and 80 Hz. Narrow band vibration reduction is also obtained at low frequencies due to the rocking of the surface cylinders on the ground surface. The results stimulate using this new concept to protect civil structures from railway induced vibration. Moreover, an advantage of this design is the possibility of embedding the resonators into the soil, yielding an efficient locally resonant metabarrier. [1] S. Brûlé, E.H. Javelaud, S. Enoch, and S. Guenneau. Experiments on seismic metamaterials: molding surface waves. Phy. Rev. Let.,112(13):133901,2014. [2] F. Zeighami, A. Palermo, A. Vratsikidis, Z. Cheng, D. Pitilakis, and A. Marzani. Medium-scale resonant wave barrier for seismic surface waves. Mech. Bas. Des. of Struct. and Mac.,49:8,1157–1172,2021.