Underwater Acoustic Multiplexing Communication by Pentamode Metasurface

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel pentamode metasurface that enables efficient underwater acoustic multiplexing using orbital angular momentum, significantly improving data transmission capacity and demonstrating real-time image transfer.

Contribution

It introduces an impedance matching pentamode metasurface for underwater OAM multiplexing, a novel application in underwater acoustics.

Findings

Successful numerical demonstration of real-time image transfer using OAM multiplexing

High transmission efficiency achieved through impedance matching metasurface

Potential for practical underwater acoustic communication systems

Abstract

As the dominant information carrier in water, acoustic wave is widely used for underwater detection, communication and imaging. Even though underwater acoustic communication has been greatly improved in the past decades, it still suffers from the slow transmission speed and low information capacity. The recently developed acoustic orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing communication promises a high efficiency, large capacity and fast transmission speed for acoustic communication. However, the current works on OAM multiplexing communication mainly appears in airborne acoustics. The application of acoustic OAM for underwater communication remains to be further explored and studied. In this paper, an impedance matching pentamode demultiplexing metasurface is designed to realize multiplexing and demultiplexing in underwater acoustic communication. The impedance matching of the metasurface ensures high transmission of the transmitted information. The information encoded into two different OAM beams as two independent channels is numerically demonstrated by realizing real-time picture transfer. The simulation shows the effectiveness of the system for underwater acoustic multiplexing communication. This work paves the way for experimental demonstration and practical application of OAM multiplexing for underwater acoustic communication