Creating vibration isolator by cutting and folding bands

Abstract

This work reports a high-quality and inexpensive vibration isolator with quasi-zero stiffness, which consists of two orthogonally aligned bands with appropriate cutting and folding. It is so concise that you can readily and immediately fabricate it anytime and anywhere if you want. Other advantages include, but not limited to, tunability, designability, and scalability: we can tune the static load-carrying capacity on-demand by intentionally adjusting the folding angle, design the static and dynamic properties by elaborately setting the geometry of cutting and folding, and fabricate small-scale devices by modern fabrication techniques. The operating principle and the isolating performance are demonstrated theoretically and experimentally; a universal scale law is derived analytically. Moreover, the relation between the geometry of the isolator and the mechanism of animals’ legs is revealed, offering a novel perspective on understanding living bodies.