Theoretical and experimental analysis of the stop-band behavior of elastic springs with periodically discontinuous of curvature.

The advanced design of springs with tailored transmission characteristics is proposed. The existence of frequency stop-bands in the transmission characteristics is theoretically predicted and experimentally validated. The underlying mechanism of generating stop-band behavior is the periodic discontinuity of the curvature. The theoretical analysis is performed in the framework of the Floquet theory for an infinitely long spring. Experimental results are obtained for the springs consisting of a small number of repeated periodicity cells.