Hierarchical Large-Scale Elastic Metamaterials as an Innovative Passive Isolation Strategy for Seismic Wave Mitigation

Large scale elastic metamaterials as an innovative passive isolation strategy for seismic waves has recently attracted increasing interest in the scientific community. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of an innovative design based on hierarchical organization of the unit cell, i.e. a structure having a self-similar geometry repeated at different scale levels. Results show how the introduction of hierarchy allows the conception of unit cells exhibiting reduced size while attaining good isolation efficiency at frequencies of interest for earthquake engineering.