Active cloaking of finite defects for flexural waves in elastic plates

TL;DR

This paper introduces an active cloaking method for elastic plates that uses control sources to cancel scattering from defects, effectively hiding both circular and arbitrarily shaped inclusions in thin plates.

Contribution

The paper develops a semi-analytical, asymptotic algorithm for active cloaking of finite defects in elastic plates, extending cloaking techniques to arbitrarily shaped scatterers.

Findings

Control sources effectively eliminate scattering of flexural waves.

The method successfully cloaks both circular and irregularly shaped inclusions.

Optimal configurations depend on the number and placement of control sources.

Abstract

We present a new method to create an active cloak for a rigid inclusion in a thin plate, and analyse flexural waves within such a plate governed by the Kirchhoff plate equation. We consider scattering of both a plane wave and a cylindrical wave by a single clamped inclusion of circular shape. In order to cloak the inclusion, we place control sources at small distances from the scatterer and choose their intensities to eliminate propagating orders of the scattered wave, thus reconstructing the respective incident wave. We then vary the number and position of the control sources to obtain the most effective configuration for cloaking the circular inclusion. Finally, we successfully cloak an arbitrarily shaped scatterer in a thin plate by deriving a semi-analytical, asymptotic algorithm.