Periodic cellular structures can exhibit metamaterial properties, such as phononic band gaps. In order to detect these frequency bands of strong wave attenuation experimentally, several devices for wave excitation and measurement can be applied. In this work, piezoelectric transducers are utilized to excite two additively manufactured three-dimensional cellular structures. For the measurement of the transmission factor, we compare two methods. First, the transmitted waves are measured with the same kind of piezoelectric transducer. Second, a laser Doppler vibrometer is employed to scan the mechanical vibrations of the sample on both the emitting and receiving surfaces. The additional comparison of two different methods of spatial averaging of the vibrometer data, that is, the quadratic mean and arithmetic mean, provides insight into the way the piezoelectric transducers convert the transmitted signal. Experimental results are supported by numerical simulations of the dispersion relation and a simplified transmission simulation.
Keywords: additive manufacturing; cellular material; elastic waves; electron beam melting; laser doppler vibrometry; mechanical metamaterial; metamaterial; phononic band gap; wave transmission.