Semi-Plenary Lecture 2

Room: E214
Time: Tuesday, 29. September 2026, 10:20 - 11:00
Chair: Alice Cicirello

Elke Deckers

Assistant Professor,
Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven, Belgium

Effective modelling of resonant metamaterials for vibro-acoustic applications.

Vibro-acoustic metamaterials have come to the fore as promising noise and vibration solutions reconciling the often conflicting requirements of low mass and volume and high noise and vibration attenuation, be it in targeted frequency bands. Their superior performance arises from stop bands, which are frequency ranges where free wave propagation is inhibited. These stopbands result from the addition or inclusion of locally resonant structures on or into a host structure on a sub-wavelength scale. This combination of length scales inherently leads to large model sizes when moving towards full component or system evaluations. This presentation will discuss effective analysis and designs tools, including model order reduction schemes , substructuring, homogenization and topology optimization. Several applications are given, ranging from an academic to an industrial scale, accounting for complex host structures and boundary conditions.

Short Bio

Elke Deckers is Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of KU Leuven Belgium. She received her MSc degree in Mechanical Engineering from KU Leuven in June 2008. During her PhD, she developed an alternative prediction method for mid-frequency vibro-acoustic analysis including poro-elastic materials, receiving her PhD degree in 2012. During her postdoc, she extended her research field to the numerical and analytical modelling of complex lightweight material systems, including viscous materials, metamaterials and meta-porous systems, and the development of supporting fast numerical prediction techniques. She did a research stay at Cambridge University and a short research stay at LAUM. She became Assistant Professor at KU Leuven Campus Diepenbeek in 2019, where she is currently broadening her domain of expertise to include also the manufacturing of lightweight material systems by polymer processing techniques like injection moulding and thermoforming. This way, she aims to close and exploit the full (digital) loop ranging from design, over manufacturing to actual product performance. Dr. Deckers is as of August 2025 head of the section LMSD within the Department of Mechanical Engineering, she is associate editor of npj Acoustics, board member of the Dutch Acoustical society and chairwoman of the annual ISAAC course on experimental and numerical techniques in applied acoustics.