Employing pre-stress to generate finite cloaks for antiplane elastic waves

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that nonlinear elastic pre-stress in neo-Hookean hyperelastic materials can create finite cloaks for antiplane elastic waves, potentially simplifying cloaking technology by avoiding complex metamaterials.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of using pre-stress to achieve broadband cloaking without specialized metamaterials, leveraging natural property induction.

Findings

Pre-stress induces inhomogeneous and anisotropic properties.

Finite cloaks can be generated using pre-stress.

Broadband cloaking is feasible without dispersive metamaterials.

Abstract

It is shown that nonlinear elastic pre-stress of neo-Hookean hyperelastic materials can be used as a mechanism to generate finite cloaks and thus render objects near-invisible to incoming antiplane elastic waves. This approach appears to negate the requirement for special cloaking metamaterials with inhomogeneous and anisotropic material properties in this case. These properties are induced naturally by virtue of the pre-stress. This appears to provide a mechanism for broadband cloaking since dispersive effects due to metamaterial microstructure will not arise.