Control of Rayleigh-like waves in thick plate Willis metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper investigates seismic cloaks in thick plates with concrete pillars, demonstrating two designs that effectively control Rayleigh waves, advancing seismic wave mitigation techniques for earthquake engineering.

Contribution

It introduces two seismic cloak designs for thick plates, including a rigorous geometric transform approach leading to Willis' equations, not previously studied in this context.

Findings

The second cloak design outperforms the first in efficiency.

Both cloaks significantly reduce wave disturbance and amplitude.

The study extends cloaking concepts to thick plates, bridging thin plate theory and semi-infinite media.

Abstract

We explore interactions of elastic waves propagating in plates (with soil parameters) structured with concrete pillars buried in the soil. Pillars are 2 m in diameter, 30 m in depth and the plate is 50 m in thickness. We study the frequency range 5 to 10 Hz, for which Rayleigh wave wavelengths are smaller than the plate thickness. This frequency range is compatible with frequency ranges of particular interest in earthquake engineering. It is demonstrated in this paper that two seismic cloaks' configurations allow for an unprecedented flow of elastodynamic energy associated with Rayleigh surface waves. The first cloak design is inspired by some approximation of ideal cloaks' parameters within the framework of thin plate theory. The second, more accomplished but more involved, cloak design is deduced from a geometric transform in the full Navier equations that preserves the symmetry of the elasticity tensor but leads to Willis' equations, well approximated by a homogenization procedure, as corroborated by numerical simulations. The two cloaks's designs are strikingly different, and the superior efficiency of the second type of cloak emphasizes the necessity for rigor in transposition of existing cloaks's designs in thin plates to the geophysics setting. Importantly, we focus our attention on geometric transforms applied to thick plates, which is an intermediate case between thin plates and semi-infinite media, not studied previously. Cloaking efficiency (reduction of the disturbance of the wave wavefront and its amplitude behind an obstacle) and protection (reduction of the wave amplitude within the center of the cloak) are studied for ideal and approximated cloaks' parameters. These results represent a preliminary step towards designs of seismic cloaks for surface Rayleigh waves propagating in sedimentary soils structured with concrete pillars.