Designing the dynamical response of elastic network materials

Disordered networks of elastic rods and blocks were shown to exhibit unique mechanical properties that can be useful for applications like energy focusing and acoustic filtering. These disordered networks offer high tunability, enabling novel functionalities, but finding optimal structures is challenging because of large design spaces. In this work, we present a new spectral method (in time) for fast and accurate designs of complex network metamaterials with targeted properties, including energy dissipation. Unlike conventional balls-and-springs models used to model mechanical truss like systems, our method incorporates a uniform mass distribution along each filament, improving accuracy, while being computationally more efficient than finite element methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in discovering network structures that optimize the efficiency of energy dissipation after an impact but also minimize construction costs. This work offers a powerful network-based theory for designing network metamaterials bridging the gap between functionality and computational feasibility.