Acoustic metamaterials for ship vibration and noise control: progress and future prospects

Ship vibration and noise control is a core technology for ensuring the stealth performance, operational comfort, and reliability of marine equipment. Traditional materials and technologies have reached performance bottlenecks in meeting key requirements such as low-frequency vibration suppression, lightweight design, and hydrostatic pressure resistance. Acoustic metamaterials, relying on extraordinary physical mechanisms such as local resonance and wavefront manipulation, provide transformative solutions for comprehensive shipborne vibration and noise control. This paper systematically reviews the two-decade development of acoustic metamaterials in naval architecture and ocean engineering, with a particular focus on breakthrough advances in four major directions over the past five years: actively tunable acoustic metamaterials, deep learning-assisted inverse design, High-performance underwater acoustic metamaterial coatings, and novel vibration-isolating metastructures. Furthermore, the underlying mechanisms and representative applications are analyzed across three key scenarios: equipment vibration reduction, high-efficiency cabin noise control, and underwater acoustic stealth. Studies show that acoustic metamaterials enable high-efficiency low-frequency control at subwavelength scales, offering inherent advantages such as compactness, lightweight construction, and highly tailorable functionality. They have been validated in laboratory settings and near-realistic environments for applications including ship foundation isolation, pipeline vibration attenuation, cabin structural noise reduction, and hull anechoic coatings, and are transitioning from fundamental research toward engineering application. However, several challenges remain, including adaptability to complex marine environments, structural and functional robustness in engineering applications, scalable manufacturing, and coordinated optimization of broadband response, wide-angle incidence performance, and high hydrostatic pressure resistance. In the future, acoustic metamaterials are expected to evolve toward integrated acoustic-mechanical-environmental design, modular mass production, intelligent adaptive regulation, multi-physics coupling, and system-level integration. Deep integration with artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing technologies will further enable a shift in ship vibration and noise control from passive mitigation to dynamic adaptation and system-level intelligence, providing critical support for enhancing the vibro-acoustic performance of high-performance ships and underwater equipment in China.