Stress Wave Attenuation in Solids for Mitigating Impulsive Loadings

Keywords: Stress wave propagation, Impulsive loading, attenuation, Finite element analysis (FEA), Genetic algorithm

Abstract: This report investigates the effect of discontinuities on the wave propagation characteristics of structures and proposes new architectures for attenuating stress waves. The effects of different types of material and geometric discontinuities are thoroughly explored, and their attenuation capacity is investigated using explicit formulas. Based on these concepts, an optimal design problem is defined for finding the most effective structural configurations to attenuate the effects of impulsive loadings. Due to the highly nonlinear nature of the optimization problem combined with lack of gradient information about the objective function with respect to design variables, a genetic algorithm (GA) optimization procedure is used for the optimal design of the newly defined attenuating systems.