A seminar entitled “Locally resonant vibro-acoustic metamaterials as NVH solutions – applications by KU Leuven” held by Elke Deckers, Assistant Professor at KU Leuven Faculty of Engineering Technology (Belgium), will take place in Beltrami room (Building 5 – piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32) Monday 12 June .

It will be possible to follow the seminar from the following  link.

Abstract  Lightweight materials and designs have been largely used in a variety of engineering applications due to the increasingly stringent ecological as well as economical requirements. However, lightweight structures typically combine low mass with high stiffness, which in turn leads to an impaired Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) insulation performance. Classical solutions to improve the vibro-acoustic performance of systems often involve the addition of mass or volume, which conflicts with the current trends towards lightweight designs. Locally resonant metamaterials (LRMs) have recently emerged and shown potential in the field of noise control engineering, allowing lightweight designs while achieving a superior noise and vibration insulation performance in tunable frequency ranges, referred to as stop bands, which are frequency zones where free wave propagation is inhibited. This presentation explains the basic concepts of locally resonant vibro-acoustic materials and shows the potential of this type of solution for noise and vibration mitigation applied to industrial automotive and aerospace relevant problems, where different production processes and materials are used. Speaker’s biosketch Elke Deckers received her MSc degree in Mechanical Engineering from KU Leuven in June 2008. During her PhD studies at the same university, she developed an alternative prediction method for mid-frequency vibro-acoustic analysis including poro-elastic materials. She received her PhD in December 2012 with a thesis entitled “A wave based approach for steady-state Biot models of poroelastic materials”. Holding a postdoctoral research grant of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), she extended her research field to the numerical and analytical modelling of complex lightweight material systems, including viscous materials, metamaterials and meta-porous systems, and the development of supporting fast numerical prediction techniques. She did a research stay at Cambridge University and a short research stay at LAUM. She was appointed Assistant Professor at KU Leuven Campus Diepenbeek in 2019, where she is currently broadening her domain of expertise to include also the production of lightweight material systems by polymer processing techniques like injection moulding and thermoforming. This way, she aims to close and exploit the full (digital) loop ranging from design, over manufacturing to the actual performance of the product.