Active cloaking for clusters of pins in thin plates

TL;DR

This paper develops an active cloaking method for clusters of pins in thin Kirchhoff plates, using exterior sources to cancel scattered waves, effective across various frequencies demonstrated through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel active cloaking technique for pin clusters in plates, utilizing Green's functions and algebraic solutions for source amplitudes, effective in different frequency regimes.

Findings

Small number of sources suffices at zero-frequency stop band.

Efficient cloaking achieved with sources on a surrounding circle at higher frequencies.

Numerical results confirm cloaking effectiveness across key frequencies.

Abstract

This paper considers active cloaking of a square array of evenly spaced pins in a Kirchhoff plate in the presence of flexural waves. Active sources are distributed exterior to the cluster and are represented by the non-singular Green's function for the biharmonic operator. The complex amplitudes of the active sources, which cancel out selected multipole orders of the scattered field, are found by solving an algebraic system of equations. For frequencies in the zero-frequency stop band, we find that a small number of active sources located on a grid is sufficient for cloaking. For higher frequencies, we achieve efficient cloaking with the active sources positioned on a circle surrounding the cluster. We demonstrate the cloaking efficiency with several numerical illustrations, considering key frequencies from band diagrams and dispersion surfaces for a Kirchhoff plate pinned in a doubly periodic fashion.