Design of Disordered Periodic Structures for Mode Localization

Periodic structures are the repetition of unit cells in space, that provide a filtering behavior for wave propagation. In particular, it is possible to tailor the geometrical, physical and elastic properties of the unit cells, in order to attenuate certain frequency bands, called band-gaps or stop-bands. Having each element characterized with the same parameters, the filtering behavior of the system can be described through the wave propagation properties of the unit cell. This is technologically impossible to obtain, therefore the Lyapunov factor is used, in order to define the mean attenuation of a quasi-periodic structure. Tailoring Gaussian unit cell properties potentially allows to extend the stop-bands width in the frequency domain. A drawback is that some unexpected resonance peaks may lie in the neighborhood of the extended regions. However, the correspondent mode-shapes are localized in a particular region of the structure, and they partially decrease the global attenuating behavior. In this paper, the aperiodicity introduced in the otherwise perfect repetition is investigated, providing an explanation for the mode-localization problem and for the stop-bands extension. Then, the proposed approach is applied to a passive quasi-periodic beam, characterized from a localized peak within a designed band-gap. The geometrical properties of its aperiodic parts are changed in order to deterministically move the localization peak in the frequency response. Numerical and experimental results are compared.