In this paper, we report the evidence of topologically protected edge waves (TPEWs) in continuum Kagome lattice. According to the bulk edge correspondence principle, such edge states are inherently linked with the topological characteristics of the material band structure and can, therefore, be predicted evaluating the associated topological invariant. Due to the non-trivial band structures shown in the context of quantum valley Hall effect, TPEWs are supported at the interface between two lattices characterized by different valley Chern numbers. The break of lattice symmetry is obtained here, in contrast with other similar works in continuum elastic structures, biasing in the stiffness properties of the unit cell, instead of manipulating mass at sublattice points. This opens new promising possibilities related to waveguide tunability and wave propagation control, exploiting the established techniques for stiffness modulation in elastic structures. A sensitivity analysis of robustness of the supported energy transport is provided, showing the amount of de-localized disorder the waveguide is immune to, and how performances are affected by perturbations in the nominal parameters of the lattice.

We present an enhanced version of the parametric nonlinear reduced-order model for shape imperfections in structural dynamics we studied in a previous work. In this model, the total displacement is split between the one due to the presence of a shape defect and the one due to the motion of the structure. This allows to expand the two fields independently using different bases. The defected geometry is described by some user-defined displacement fields which can be embedded in the strain formulation. This way, a polynomial function of both the defect field and actual displacement field provides the nonlinear internal elastic forces. The latter can be thus expressed using tensors, and owning the reduction in size of the model given by a Galerkin projection, high simulation speedups can be achieved. We show that the adopted deformation framework, exploiting Neumann expansion in the definition of the strains, leads to better accuracy as compared to the previous work. Two numerical examples of a clamped beam and a MEMS gyroscope finally demonstrate the benefits of the method in terms of speed and increased accuracy.