Manipulate elastic waves with conventional isotropic materials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that elastic waves can be manipulated using conventional isotropic materials by leveraging conformal mapping and wave mode conversions, enabling novel device designs like efficient vibration isolators.

Contribution

It introduces a method to manipulate elastic waves with isotropic materials by preserving elastodynamic energy form through conformal mapping under specific conditions.

Findings

Achieved up to 39.9dB wave transmission reduction in experiments.

Designed a vibration isolator with conventional rubbers and wave bender.

Showed elastic wave manipulation without complex metamaterials.

Abstract

Transformation methods have stimulated many interesting applications of manipulating electromagnetic and acoustic waves by using metamaterials, such as super-lens imaging and cloaking. These successes are mainly due to the form-invariant property of the Maxwell equations and acoustic equations. However, the similar progress in manipulating elastic waves is very slow, because the elastodynamic equations are not form-invariant. Here we show that the expression of the elastodynamic potential energy can almost retain its form after conformal mapping, if the longitudinal wave velocity is much larger than the transverse wave velocity, or if the wavelength can be shortened by converting the waves into surface modes. Based on these findings, it is possible to design and fabricate novel devices with ease to manipulate elastic waves at will. One example presented in this paper is an efficient vibration isolator, which contain a 180-degree wave bender made of conventional rubbers. Compared with a conventional isolator of the same shape, similar static support stiffness and smaller damping ratio, this isolator can further reduce wave transmissions by up to 39.9dB in the range of 483 to 1800 Hz in the experiment.