Optimal design of bundled layered elastic stress wave attenuators

This paper describes the development of new material architectures for mitigating the effects of impulsive loadings using layered structures. The underlying concept explored in this research relies on stress wave attenuation associated with geometric dispersion phenomena in layered structures. When an incident stress pulse passes through a layered structure, a reduced stress amplitude and elongated pulse duration can be obtained with proper selection of layer materials and dimensions. Consequently, an optimal design procedure is proposed to obtain effective material architectures. The optimization involves tuning material properties and adjusting the length of each layer, along with the total length of a multilayer structure. Attenuation of elastic stress waves propagating through the proposed simple and bundled one-dimensional elastic media are investigated by considering various layered structures situated between free and fixed surfaces.