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Abstract Active metamaterials address fundamental limitations of passive media and have widely been recognized as necessary in numerous compelling applications such as cloaking and extreme noise absorption. However, most practical devices of interest have yet to be realized due to the lack of a suitable strategy for implementing bulk active metamaterials—those that involve interacting cells and functionality beyond one dimension. Here, we present such an active acoustic metamaterial design with bulk modulus and anisotropic mass density that can be independently programmed over wide value ranges. We demonstrate this ability experimentally in several examples, targeting acoustic properties that are hard to access otherwise, such as a bulk modulus significantly smaller than air, strong mass density anisotropy, and complex bulk modulus and mass density for high reflectionless sound absorption. This work enables the transition of active acoustic metamaterials from isolated proof-of-concept demonstrations to versatile bulk materials.
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Extreme material parameters accessible by active acoustic metamaterials with Willis coupling
Active acoustic metamaterials incorporate electric circuit elements that input energy into an otherwise passive medium to aptly modulate the effective material properties. Here, we propose an active acoustic metamaterial with Willis coupling to drastically extend the tunability of the effective density and bulk modulus with the accessible parameter range enlarged by at least two orders of magnitude compared to that of a non-Willis metamaterial. Traditional active metamaterial designs are based on local resonances without considering the Willis coupling that limit their accessible effective material parameter range. Our design adopts a unit cell structure with two sensor-transducer pairs coupling the acoustic response on both sides of the metamaterial by detecting incident waves and driving active signals asymmetrically superimposed onto the passive response of the material. The Willis coupling results from feedback control circuits with unequal gains. These asymmetric feedback control circuits use Willis coupling to expand the accessible range of the effective density and bulk modulus of the metamaterial. The extreme effective material parameters realizable by the metamaterials will remarkably broaden their applications in biomedical imaging, noise control, and transformation acoustics-based cloaking.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2037565
- PAR ID:
- 10363954
- Publisher / Repository:
- Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Volume:
- 151
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0001-4966
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 1722-1729
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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