Designing Hyper-Thin Acoustic Metasurfaces with Membrane Resonators

TL;DR

This paper introduces ultra-thin acoustic metasurfaces made from membrane resonators, enabling advanced sound manipulation with minimal thickness, including negative reflection and flat mirror functionalities, suitable for compact acoustic devices.

Contribution

The work presents a novel design of hyper-thin acoustic metasurfaces using membrane resonators, achieving deep subwavelength control and new functionalities like negative reflection and ultra-thin diffusers.

Findings

Achieved a metasurface thickness of about λ/23.1 for negative reflection.

Designed a membrane-based meta-diffuser with thickness approximately λ/102.

Demonstrated versatile manipulation of reflected pressure fields.

Abstract

We design extremely-thin acoustic metasurfaces, providing a versatile platform for the manipulation of reflected pressure fields, that are constructed from mass loads and stretched membranes fixed to a periodic rigid framework. These metasurfaces demonstrate deeply subwavelength control and can have thicknesses an order of magnitude less than those based around Helmholtz resonators. Each sub-unit of the metasurface is resonant at a frequency tuned geometrically, this tunability provides phase control and using a set of finely tuned membrane resonators we create a phase-grating metasurface. This surface is designed to exhibit all-angle negative reflections with the ratio of wavelength, $\lambda$, to thickness, $h$, of $\lambda/h\approx 23.1$, and to create a flat mirror using the phase profile of an elliptic reflecting mirror. A further important acoustic application is to sound diffusers and we proceed to design a deeply subwavelength membrane-based meta-diffuser that can be two orders of magnitude thinner than the operating wavelength, i.e. thickness $\approx\lambda/102$. This paves the way for developing advanced acoustic metasurfaces with applicability to functional acoustic devices in sound-related industries.