Emergence of Seismic Metamaterials: Current State and Future Perspectives

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development and current state of seismic metamaterials, discussing their types, material parameters, and future applications like large-scale foundations and urban seismic protection.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of seismic metamaterials, including recent advances, material parameter analysis, and future perspectives for large-scale applications.

Findings

Seismic metamaterials have been developed for soft soils and structures.

Full-scale experiments have validated some seismic metamaterial concepts.

Future applications include city-scale seismic protection and large-scale foundations.

Abstract

Following the advent of electromagnetic metamaterials at the turn of the century, researchers working in other areas of wave physics have translated concepts of electromagnetic metamaterials to acoustics, elastodynamics, as well as to heat, mass and light diffusion processes. In elastodynamics, seismic metamaterials have emerged in the last decade for soft soils structured at the meter scale, and have been tested thanks to full-scale experiments on holey soils five years ago. Born in the soil, seismic metamaterials grow simultaneously on the field of tuned-resonators buried in the soil, around building's foundations or near the soil-structure's interface, and on the field of above-surface resonators. In this perspective article, we quickly recall some research advances made in all these types of seismic metamaterials and we further dress an inventory of which material parameters can be achieved and which cannot, notably from the effective medium theory perspective. We finally envision perspectives on future developments of large scale auxetic metamaterials for building's foundations, forests of trees for seismic protection and metamaterial-like transformed urbanism at the city scale.