Flexural wave propagation in canonical quasicrystalline-generated waveguides

Abstract

We investigate the propagation of harmonic flexural waves in periodic two-phase phononic multi-supported continuous beams whose elementary cells are designed according to the quasicrystalline standard Fibonacci substitution rule. The resulting dynamic frequency spectra are studied with the aid of a trace-map formalism which provides a geometrical interpretation of the recursive rule governing traces of the relevant transmission matrices: the traces of three consecutive elementary cells can be represented as a point on the surface defined by an invariant function of the square root of the circular frequency, and the recursivity implies the description of a discrete orbit on the surface. In analogy with the companion axial problem, we show that, for specific layouts of the elementary cell (the canonical configurations), the orbits are almost periodic. Likewise, for the same layouts, the stop-/pass-band diagrams along the frequency domain are almost periodic. Several periodic orbits exist and each corresponds to a self-similar portion of the dynamic spectra whose scaling law can be investigated by linearising the trace map in the neighbourhood of the orbit. The obtained results provide a new piece of theory to better understand the dynamic behaviour of two-phase flexural periodic waveguides whose elementary cell is obtained from quasicrystalline generation rules.