Rapid Prototyping Journal

Design, fabrication, and evaluation of negative stiffness elements using SLS

Lia Kashdan Carolyn Conner Seepersad Michael Haberman Preston S. Wilson
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Lia Kashdan Carolyn Conner Seepersad Michael Haberman Preston S. Wilson, (2012),"Design, fabrication, and evaluation of
negative stiffness elements using SLS", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 18 Iss 3 pp. 194 - 200
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 Design, fabrication, and evaluation of negative
stiffness elements using SLS
Lia Kashdan, Carolyn Conner Seepersad, Michael Haberman and Preston S. Wilson
Mechanical Engineering Department and Applied Research Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA

Abstract
Purpose – Recent research has shown that constrained bistable structures can display negative stiffness behavior and provide extremal vibrational
and acoustical absorptive capacity. These bistable structures are therefore compelling candidates for constructing new meta-materials for noise
reduction, anechoic coatings, and backing materials for broadband imaging transducers. To date, demonstrations of these capabilities have been
primarily theoretical because the geometry of bistable elements is difficult to construct and refine with conventional manufacturing methods and
materials. The purpose of this paper is to leverage the geometric design freedoms provided by selective laser sintering (SLS) technology to design and
construct constrained bistable structures with negative stiffness behavior.
Design/methodology/approach – A meso-scale negative stiffness system is designed and fabricated with SLS technology. The system includes a
bistable structure in the form of a pre-compressed/pre-buckled beam. The dynamic transmissibility of the system is measured, and its behavior is
compared to the predictions of analytical models.
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Findings – Experimental results demonstrate that pre-compression and pre-buckling can be used to induce negative stiffness behavior and thereby
increase the damping and shift the resonant frequency of an unconstrained beam.
Originality/value – The results support the usefulness of SLS and other additive manufacturing technologies for acoustic and dynamic applications.
Specifically, the demonstrated advantages of SLS include the ability to rapidly redesign, functionally 2 prototype, and tune physical models for acoustic
and dynamic experimentation. Of significant importance is the ability of SLS to enable consolidation of parts that are traditionally separate, thereby
reducing vibrational noise in these systems. In this specific application, SLS enables a proof-of-concept comparison of the theoretical and experimental
behavior of a meso-scale negative stiffness system. The demonstrated acoustical and vibrational absorptive capacity of these systems is expected to
lead to designs for new structures and materials that offer significantly improved energy absorbing capabilities over a broad range of tunable
frequencies without compromising structural stiffness.

Keywords Manufacturing systems, Sintering, Damping, Mechanical properties of materials, Selective laser sintering, Negative stiffness,
Bistable structure, Transmissibility, Energy absorption

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction One very simple example of a system displaying negative

Negative stiffness elements have been identified as unique
mechanisms for enhancing acoustical and vibrational damping.
Examples of negative stiffness mechanisms include mechanical
systems with bistable configurations (Prasad and Diaz, 2006)
and materials with negative moduli (Lakes, 2001; Lakes et al.,
2001). Negative stiffness elements contribute to damping
behavior because they tend to assist rather than resist
deformation as a result of internally stored energy
(Lakes, 2001; Lakes et al., 2001).
Negative stiffness systems are somewhat rare and therefore
not as well understood or utilized as positive stiffness systems.
Positive stiffness systems offer increasing resistance to
deformation due to externally applied forces. On the contrary,
a negative stiffness system offers decreasing resistance to an
applied load and can even assist the applied force in deforming
the system. This behavior leads to significantly larger system
deformation than would be observed for the same force applied
to a positive stiffness system.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1355-2546.htm
Rapid Prototyping Journal
18/3 (2012) 194– 200
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 1355-2546]
[DOI 10.1108/13552541211218108]
stiffness properties is a buckled beam, such as the one shown in
Figure 1 (Haberman, 2007). A transverse force applied to an
unbuckled beam will cause the beam to deflect in proportion to
that applied external force and the beam will return to its original
state when all forces are removed. A buckled beam, however,
initially resists deformation due to an applied transverse load, but
once a certain threshold is reached, the beam “snaps through” to
a new configuration, and remains in that configuration even after
the force is removed. Figure 1 shows a buckled beam with pinned
ends moving though the three points of equilibrium under
displacement controlled deformation. In (1) the beam is in the
first stable equilibrium state and when a transverse force
is applied, it transits to the meta-stable state (2) and through to
the second stable state (3). Even after removing the force, the
beam will remain in position (3). Both positions (1) and (3) are
stable equilibrium points in this system because the internal
energy of the structure is minimized in those configurations.
The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Applied Research
Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin and the DARPA
Strategic Technology Office (HR0011-10-C-0125) under
Dr Aaron Lazarus. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and
do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.
Received: 15 February 2010
Revised: 11 August 2010, 4 February 2011, 28 April 2011
Accepted: 29 June 2011

194
 Design and evaluation of negative stiffness elements using SLS
Lia Kashdan et al.
Figure 1 Stages of snap-through movement of a buckled beam
1D Example:
Post - buckled Beam
(1) (2) (3)
F(x1) F(x2) F(x3)
Notes: (1) The beam is in an initial
stable buckled state; (2) a force is
applied to the beam and sends it to
the meta-stable state; a slight
change in displacement sends the
beam to; (3) the second stable
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buckled state
Plots of force versus transverse displacement and strain energy
versus transverse displacement are shown in Figures 2 and 3,
respectively. In both figures, the behavior of a completely
buckled beam is plotted alongside the behavior of an unbuckled
beam. The three states shown in Figures 2 and 3 correspond to
the states shown in Figure 1. As shown in Figure 3, the
equilibrium positions of the buckled beam correspond to local
minima and maxima of the strain energy curve. Since the
transverse force applied to the beam corresponds to the spatial
derivative of its strain energy, points of zero slope in the energy
curve therefore represent regions of zero force in Figure 2.
A beam that is unbuckled (axial constraining force less than or
equal to the critical Euler buckling load) will display a
monotonically increasing force versus displacement curve as
Figure 2 Plot of the force vs displacement of the center of a beam in
the transverse direction
Notes: The curves are marked according to the states in
Figure 1, and the buckled beam displays negative stiffness in
the region marked k < 0.F, Pcr, ∆x, and Lo represent the
transverse force applied at the center of the beam, the Euler
buckling force, the transverse displacement of the center of the
beam, and the free length of the beam, respectively
Source: Image from Haberman (2007)
195
Rapid Prototyping Journal
Volume 18 · Number 3 · 2012 · 194 –200
Figure 3 Plot of strain energy vs transient displacement
Notes: Points (1)-(3) match those in Figures 1 and 2; U, Lo,
Pcr, and Dx represent strain energy, the free length of the
beam, the Euler buckling force, and the transverse
displacement of the center of the beam, respectively
Source: Image from Haberman (2007)
shown in Figure 2. The force versus displacement curve for
buckled beams is non-monotonic;, i.e. it contains regions of
negative slope. This region is seen in Figure 2 where k , 0 and
corresponds to the inflection points of the strain energy versus
displacement curve. The negative stiffness region can be elicited
by applying a transverse force to the center of a beam in state (1)
or state (3), each of which is characterized by a strain energy
minimum, to position it in the meta-stable state indicated by
position (2). The local maximum region on the strain energy
curve at state (2) in Figure 3 shows that the beam contains more
stored energy in that state than in either bistable state.
Constraining the beam in this configuration stores energy in the
beam and leads to “snap through” behavior if the constraining
force is removed. However, if the beam can be held in this
configuration, the elevated stored energy level may be exploited
to do work on the external constraining system. It is
hypothesized that this mechanism causes the heightened
damping in the system. It is important to note that a buckled
beam is a simple one-dimensional example of a bistable
structure, and that negative stiffness behavior is implicit to
constrained bistable elements of any configuration (Prasad and
Diaz, 2006; Qiu et al., 2004).
This negative stiffness behavior has been validated by
experimental studies of buckled tubes and carbon nanotubes.
Lakes et al. (2001) found that cells containing a buckled silicone
rubber tube achieved a damping that was significantly larger
than the unbuckled system under sinusoidal forcing.
Furthermore, similar studies on multi-walled carbon
nanotubes have shown that buckled tube components achieve
higher damping than unbuckled tubes even on the nano-scale
(Yap et al., 2007). Minus K Technologies uses similar structures
to create vibration isolation tables that use negative stiffness
elements to significantly reduce the resonant frequency of
support structures (Platus, 1999). These findings confirm that
buckled beams are negative stiffness elements under specific
conditions and that they can therefore be used for damping
purposes. Unfortunately, current conventional manufacturing
processes make iterative design and tuning of the negative
 Design and evaluation of negative stiffness elements using SLS
Lia Kashdan et al.
stiffness elements nearly impossible for parts with complex
geometries, which makes the design and fabrication of negative
stiffness elements a candidate application for selective laser
sintering (SLS). SLS fabricates parts in a layer-wise manner by
selectively fusing powdered material in regions defined by the
part’s cross-sectional geometry (Beaman et al., 1997). SLS is
one of several additive manufacturing technologies that permit
layer-wise fabrication of complex parts directly from CAD
models without part-specific tooling (Gibson et al., 2010;
Bourell et al., 2009).
The process of using additive manufacturing technologies to
create structures or materials that provide acoustic or
vibrational damping has not been studied extensively. One
example of the use of additive manufacturing to solve a problem
in the acoustics domain employed SLS to produce a passive
destructive interference acoustic absorber (Godbold et al.,
2007). The absorber reduced acoustic pressure at specific
frequencies by directing waves through two channels of
different lengths thereby creating destructive interference at
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the exit. However, destructive interference is very different from
the negative stiffness mechanism investigated in this research,
and negative stiffness has not been investigated with SLS or
other additive manufacturing technologies. Compared to
conventional manufacturing techniques, SLS and other
additive manufacturing technologies offer many benefits
(Hague et al., 2003; Hopkinson et al., 2006; Evans and
Campbell, 2003; Campbell et al., 2007; Gibson et al., 2010;
Rosen, 2007), including increased design freedom for fine-
tuning the geometry, the ability to rapidly iterate through design
permutations, and the ability to build complex geometries,
thereby reducing the number of required fasteners and the
unwanted vibrational noise caused by those extra parts.
The primary goal of this research is to use SLS to fabricate a
negative stiffness, bistable system as a means of conducting
proof-of-concept investigations of the system’s dynamic
behavior and assessing broader opportunities for additively
manufacturing negative stiffness systems for damping
applications. In the next section, models are presented for
designing the structure and interpreting its observed behavior.
In Section 3, the design and fabrication of the structure is
described along with the dynamic testing procedure.
Experimental results are presented in Section 4. In Section 5,
conclusions are highlighted, and opportunities are identified for
using additive manufacturing to fabricate functional negative
stiffness structures for various acoustic and vibration damping
applications.
2. System modeling
A simplified model of the dynamic behavior of the negative
stiffness system is developed to inform the design of the system.
Figure 4 shows the simplification of a buckled beam element
into spring and damper components. The buckled beam
element can be replaced with two compressed springs of spring
constant kb where the value of kb is given by Saif (2000):
p2 EI
kb ¼
L2
where E is the Young’s Modulus of the material, I is the area
moment of inertia of the beam, and L is the uncompressed half-
length of the beam. The beam length, lb,c, is the vertical
compressed length of the beam and the ratio between the
compressed and uncompressed beam lengths is s ¼ (lb,c/L).
Rapid Prototyping Journal
Volume 18 · Number 3 · 2012 · 194 –200
Figure 4 Simplified model of a buckled beam system
kb lb,c
kb lb,c
ks ks
m m
cv
lb,c lb,c
kb kb
The constrained spring elements, kb, that represent the beam
would not be stable in the configuration shown in the second
state in Figure 1, and therefore a constraining spring must be
used to hold the beam in the meta-stable position. It is assumed
that this constraining spring, ks, is lossy and therefore includes a
damping term, cv. The equivalent mass, m, includes the entire
mass of the beam as well as one-third of the mass of the spring
(Sherman and Butler, 2007).
The response of this system at various frequency inputs can
be measured by the system transmissibility. Transmissibility is
a transfer function, H(v), that measures the frequency
dependent ratio of the displacement, ubeam, at the center of
the beam relative to the input displacement, ubase, at the base
of the spring. The amplitude of the transfer function jH(v)j is
calculated as follows (based on the derivation provided by
Kashdan (2010)):


sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi

ubeam ðvÞ
K 2 ð1 2 h2 Þ
jHðvÞj ¼


¼ ð2Þ
ubase ðvÞ
h K þ ½1 2 ðv=vn Þ2

2 2
where h is the loss factor of the spring material. The variable
K is a measurement of the overall stiffness of the system, and
depends on both the stiffness of the constraining spring and
the negative stiffness of the beam, represented by ks and kn,
respectively:
ks 2kb ðs 2 1Þ
K¼ ; where kn ¼ ð3Þ
ks þ kn s
In equation 3, s is less than unity when the beam is compressed
and therefore kn is always negative when the beam is buckled.
The value of K equals unity when the system is uncompressed
(s ¼ 1, kn ¼ 0), and increases as the beam is buckled. Equation 2
also contains a ratio of the input frequency, v, and the resonant
frequency of the system, vn, given by:
rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
ks þ kn
vn ¼ ð4Þ
m
The existence of this ratio in the denominator of equation 2
indicates that as the input frequency approaches the resonant
frequency, the quantity 1 2 (v/vn)2 tends to zero
and the amplitude of the transmissibility approaches its
maximum value. Equation 4 implies that the resonance
ð1Þ frequency of the system decreases with increasing beam
compression since the system mass and spring constant, ks,
remain constant. These trends are particularly important for
vibration isolation applications of negative stiffness elements. The
trends are shown in a plot of the transfer function for a
representative system with various amounts of compression in
Figure 5.
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 Design and evaluation of negative stiffness elements using SLS Rapid Prototyping Journal
Lia Kashdan et al. Volume 18 · Number 3 · 2012 · 194 –200

Figure 5 Transmissibility versus input frequency for a negative stiffness system with kb ¼ 541 N/m, ks ¼ 1,100 N/m, h ¼ 0.03, m ¼ 0.0059 kg,
E ¼ 1,220 MPa
Transmissibility Transfer Function
40
kn/ks = 0
30
kn/ks = –0.19
20log10[ H(ω)],(dB)

20
kn/ks = –0.33
10
kn/ks = –0.43
0 kn/ks = –0.5
–10 [kn/ks]true = –0.02
–20
–30
–40
–50 0
10 101 102 103

0
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kn/ks = 0
–20
kn/ks = –0.19
–40
kn/ks = –0.33
Angle [H(ω)],( °)

–60
kn/ks = –0.43
–80 kn/ks = –0.5
–100 [kn/ks]true = –0.02
–120
–140
–160
–180 0
10 101 102 103
Frequency (HZ)

The unbuckled beam in this simplified model has a resonance 3. Dynamic testing
frequency of approximately 70 Hz and an amplitude gain at
To test the transmissibility of a constrained, bistable structure, a
resonance of 30 dB. As the system is increasingly compressed,
physical system was fabricated with SLS. The resulting system
the resonance frequency decreases, as predicted from
is shown in Figure 6. As shown, the left wall of the system is free
equation (4), and the amplitude of the peak transmissibility to slide towards the right to compress the structure. Threaded
decreases. These trends are compared to experimental data rods (not shown) are inserted through the left and right end
from dynamic tests of the physical system in Section 4. plates of the part to progressively compress the beam in
Another important aspect of the system’s behavior is its controlled increments. A constraining spring is attached to a
transmissibility at frequencies well below resonance (known as rigid frame on one side and the beam center point on the other,
the quasistatic domain), which is also investigated in Section 4. as shown in Figure 6. When the beam is axially loaded, the
For systems with no pre-compression, the transmissibility at low spring imparts a force on the beam and thereby constrains the
frequencies will approach 0 dB, indicating that the motion of the beam to its meta-stable state when it is buckled.
base is the same as the motion of the beam. However, the simple
transmissibility model given above predicts that the
Figure 6 The negative stiffness system, fabricated with SLS and Nylon 11
transmissibility of a system containing a pre-compressed
beam is greater than zero as the frequency approaches zero.
This non-zero transmissibility implies that the motion at the
center of the pre-compressed beam is larger than that of the base
despite the fact that inertial effects are not significant. This
trend is predicted because the beam contains internally stored
energy, due to its constrained, pre-compressed state. The stored
energy in the beam induces larger deflections of the constraining
spring, even under quasi-static forcing, and therefore performs
work on the constraining system, dissipating energy in the
process. This quasistatic behavior is important for the design of
highly absorptive materials, composed of negative stiffness
inclusions that are much smaller than acoustic wavelengths.

197
 Design and evaluation of negative stiffness elements using SLS Rapid Prototyping Journal
Lia Kashdan et al. Volume 18 · Number 3 · 2012 · 194 –200

The system was built with a 3DSystemsw Sinterstationw Figure 8 Experimentally measured transmissibility of the negative
HiQTM SLS machine with the machine settings documented in stiffness system
Table I and a mix of 50 percent virgin and 50 percent recycled
Nylon 11 material. The part dimensions included a beam Transmissibility of a Negative Stiffness System
40 1
thickness of 2.5 mm, a beam width of 8 mm, and an Increasing
2
compression length vs.
free length: Lcomp/Lo

uncompressed beam length of 155 mm. The constraining buckling 3 100%

4 99.97%
spring was designed with a spring constant of approximately 30
5 99.86%

1,100 N/m. The E and h values of the sintered Nylon 11 6 99.82%

20Log10(H(ω)) (dB)
7 99.74%
material were assumed to be 1,220 MPa and 0.03, respectively, 20 99.61%
99.51%
based on measurements of tensile test specimens fabricated in
the same SLS build as the prototype negative stiffness system. 10
The design specifications of the system were tuned to hold the
beam in the meta-stable state when compressed. 0
The vibration transmissibility of the physical system was
determined with the experimental apparatus shown in Figure 7.
–10
Holes in the base permitted direct attachment of the part to the
shaker table (Labworks Inc. model ET-139). The shaker table
–20
excited the system with a periodic chirp from 30 to 200 Hz, a 30 50 70 90 110 130 150 170 190
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range that contained the first resonance peak, and tests were Frequency (Hz)
repeated for multiple levels of axial pre-compression of the beam.
Note: The labels correspond to the pre-compression levels
The tests began with the beam in a completely uncompressed
documented in Table II
position. The threaded rods in the assembly were incrementally
tightened to progressively pre-compress the beam in increments
of approximately 0.1 mm. The beam was pre-compressed corresponding amount of pre-compression and an approximate
enough to reach its metastable position and then additional image of the pre-stressed beam before the shaker test began.
pre-compression was applied until the stiffness of the As expected, from the analysis in Section 2, the resonant
constraining spring was no longer adequate to hold the beam to frequency and the amplitude of the resonance peak decrease
its meta-stable state and it snapped to one of its stable, buckled with increased pre-compression of the beam. Resonance of the
equilibrium positions. uncompressed beam, peak 1, occurs at approximately 140 Hz
while resonance for the fully buckled beam, peak 7, occurs at
4. Experimental results less than 70 Hz. Note that at 140 Hz, the transmissibilities of
states 6 and 7 assume negative values, meaning that the
Several representative transmissibility curves are shown in amplitude of the displacement of the beam is smaller than that
Figure 8. Figure 9 matches each curve in Figure 8 with a of the input. Between states 1 and 7 the transmissibility of the
system at 140 Hz is lowered by 43 dB simply by pre-
Table I 3D Systems Sinterstation HiQ SLS machine settings for compressing the beam 0.5 percent of its uncompressed
fabricating the negative stiffness system length. Similarly, the resonance frequency of the system can
be tuned by adjusting the level of pre-compression. These two
Parameters Settings effects are a clear indication of the effectiveness of negative
stiffness elements for providing vibration isolation.
Part bed temperature 1878C
Another salient behavior is that the resonance peak
Left/right feed bin temperature 1428C
broadens and decreases in magnitude as the beam is
Laser power 38 W
compressed, which is also comparable to the trends
Inner/outer ratio 0.8
modeled in Section 2. The reduction in response amplitude
Scan spacing 0.25 mm and broadening of the resonance peak indicates that the
Layer time 20 s presence of a lossy pre-compressed beam element increases
Layer thickness 0.1 mm the overall damping of the system. The reduced amplitude
Roller speed 25.4 cm/s and broadening of the peaks can be seen more clearly in
Figure 10, which shows the transmissibility as a function of
normalized frequency, thereby aligning the resonant peaks.
Figure 7 Schematic of the experimental apparatus State 1, the unbuckled system, obtains a maximum amplitude
Accelerometers of approximately 37 dB while state 7, the fully buckled system,
obtains an amplitude of 19 dB at resonance. This shift is
Signal equivalent to an 87 percent increase in damping,
Bistable System Conditioner which is notable considering that the total compression
of the system is only 0.772 mm or less than 0.5 percent of the
Power Amplifier free length of the beam. As discussed previously in Section 2,
Shaker one would expect the transmissibility of a system containing
Table only positive stiffness elements to vanish as frequency tends to
zero. However, the transmissibility of a negative stiffness system
is expected to exhibit positive values well below resonance,
Computer Vector Signal
Analyzer which increase as a function of pre-compression.
Low-frequency transmissibility measurements of the negative

198
 Design and evaluation of negative stiffness elements using SLS Rapid Prototyping Journal
Lia Kashdan et al. Volume 18 · Number 3 · 2012 · 194 –200

Figure 9 This figure outlines the compression for each state in Figures 8 and 9

State Total Amount of Exaggerated Beam Deflection

Number Compression (mm)

1 0

2 0.045

3 0.213

4 0.285

5 0.409

6 0.604

7 0.772
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Notes: The image shows the exaggerated shape of the beam’s deflection for each
state of pre-compression; at state 6, the beam reaches the end of its metastable
condition and becomes completely buckled in state 7; exaggerated shapes are
determined by visual inspection

Figure 10 Transmissibility of the negative stiffness system versus Figure 11 Quasi-static transmissibility of the negative stiffness system
frequency, normalized by the resonance frequency of each state in Table II at low frequencies
Quasistatic Transmissibility
Normalized Transmissibility of Negative Stiffness System
2
40 compression length vs. compression
free length: Lcomp/Lo length vs. free
100% 1.8 length: Lcomp/Lo
99.97%
30 1.6 100.00%
99.86%
20Log10(H(ω)) (dB)

99.81%
20Log10(H(ω)) (dB)

99.82%
99.74%
1.4 99.65%
20
99.61% 99.46%
99.51%
1.2
99.27%
10 1 98.91%
98.78%
0.8
0
0.6

–10 0.4

0.2
–20 0
0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4
16 16.5 17 17.5 18 18.5 19 19.5 20
Normalized Frequency (f/fn)
Frequency (Hz)

stiffness system are shown in Figure 11 for a frequency range 5. Closure

from 16 to 20 Hz. Sufficient excitation amplitude could not be
obtained below 16 Hz, preventing investigation at lower
frequencies. As shown in Figure 11, transmissibility curves
obtained for different states are nearly parallel and increase in
value with the level of pre-compression of the beam. These plots
show that the displacement of the beam element is larger than
the base at low frequencies and that the amplitude increase
is proportional to level of pre-compression of the beam element.
This stored energy does work on the spring, which causes the
damping of system vibrations. These experimental results
follow the trends predicted in Section 2, but the values are
smaller than the model predictions because the model does not
consider damping in the beam itself. In reality, the beam and the
spring have inherent damping because they are both made of
sintered Nylon 11, a lossy material.
One of the goals of this research was to use SLS to fabricate a
negative stiffness system as a means of conducting proof-of-
concept investigations of the system’s dynamic behavior.
Towards this goal, a bistable system – specifically, a pre-
compressed beam that has been shown theoretically to exhibit
negative stiffness behavior – was built with SLS technology.
The results from dynamic experiments indicated that a simple
negative stiffness system has the ability to increase system
damping and tune dynamic behavior. Peak amplitudes of
transmissibility were shown to decrease with increasing
amounts of beam pre-compression. Quasistatic measurements
indicated that the transmissibility of the buckled beam is finite
and positive at low frequencies, indicating that the system is
functional for a larger frequency range than most meta-material
inclusions.

199
 Design and evaluation of negative stiffness elements using SLS
Lia Kashdan et al.
A second goal of this research was to assess opportunities
for additively manufacturing negative stiffness systems for
damping applications. This research has demonstrated that
additive manufacturing is extremely useful as a tool for the
design and prototyping of negative stiffness systems. As
discussed in Section 2, additive manufacturing enabled rapid
redesign and tuning of the experiment, including part
consolidation to minimize noise in the apparatus during
dynamic testing. In addition to its design and prototyping
applications, additive manufacturing technology is expected
to be useful for fabricating end-use parts. As an example,
additive manufacturing (e.g. SLS or selective laser melting)
could be employed to create negative stiffness vibration
isolation structures, such as the one studied in the present
work, for direct implementation in applications such as
optical tables. Also, microscale additive manufacturing
methods could be used to fabricate microscale negative
stiffness elements that may be embedded within a continuous
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viscoelastic host material for production of bulk materials
with energy absorbing capacity that surpasses existing
homogeneous or composite viscoelastic materials. Additively
manufactured negative stiffness structures could be used to
create tunable multiscale structured materials that have
macroscopic stiffness and damping properties that are
superior to conventional materials or structures. Indeed,
additive manufacturing technology provides a very unique
and powerful means for both prototyping and fabricating
negative stiffness mechanisms for a broad range of
applications requiring absorption of or isolation from
dynamic mechanical energy.
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Corresponding author
Carolyn Conner Seepersad can be contacted at: ccseepersad@
mail.utexas.edu
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