Wave attenuation in viscoelastic hierarchical plates

Phononic crystals (PCs) are periodic structures obtained by the spatial arrangement of materials with contrasting properties, which can be designed to efficiently manipulate mechanical waves. Plate structures can be modeled using the Mindlin–Reissner plate theory and have been extensively used to analyze the dispersion relations of PCs. Although the analysis of the propagating characteristics of PCs may be sufficient for simple elastic structures, analyzing the evanescent wave behavior becomes fundamental if the PC contains viscoelastic components. Another complication is that increasingly intricate material distributions in the unit cell of PCs with hierarchical configuration may render the calculation of the complex band structure (i.e., considering both propagating and evanescent waves) prohibitive due to excessive computational workload. In this work, we propose a new extended plane wave expansion formulation to compute the complex band structure of thick PC plates with arbitrary material distribution using the Mindlin–Reissner plate theory containing constituents with a viscoelastic behavior approximated by a Kelvin–Voigt model. We apply the method to investigate the evanescent behavior of periodic hierarchically structured plates for either (i) a hard purely elastic matrix with soft viscoelastic inclusions or (ii) a soft viscoelastic matrix with hard purely elastic inclusions. Our results show that for (i), an increase in the hierarchical order leads to a weight reduction with relatively preserved attenuation characteristics, including attenuation peaks due to locally resonant modes that present a decrease in attenuation upon increasing viscosity levels. For (ii), changing the hierarchical order implies in opening band gaps in distinct frequency ranges, with an overall attenuation improved by an increase in the viscosity levels