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The square lattice phononic crystal (PnC) has been used extensively to demonstrate metamaterial effects. Here, positive and negative refraction and reflection are observed simultaneously due to the presence of Umklapp scattering of sound at the surface of PnC and square-like equifrequency contours (EFCs). It is found that a shift in the EFC of the third transmission band away from the center of the Brillouin zone results in an effectively inverted EFC. The overlap of the EFC of the second and third band produce quasimomentum-matching conditions that lead to multi-refringence phenomena from a single incident beam without the introduction of defects into the lattice. Additionally, the coupling of a near-normal incident wave to a propagating almost perpendicular Bloch mode is shown to lead to strong right-angle redirection and collimation of the incident acoustic beam. Each effect is demonstrated both numerically and experimentally for scattering of ultrasound at a 10-period PnC slab in water environment.

This work demonstrates the detections and mappings of a solid object using a thermally tunable solid-state phononic crystal lens at low frequency for potential use in future long-distance detection. The phononic crystal lens is infiltrated with a polyvinyl alcohol-based poly n-isopropyl acrylamide (PVA-PNIPAm) bulk hydrogel polymer. The hydrogel undergoes a volumetric phase transition due to a temperature change leading to a temperature-dependent sound velocity and density. The temperature variation from 20 °C to 39 °C changes the focal length of the tunable solid-state lens by 1 cm in the axial direction. This thermo-reversible tunable focal length lens was used in a monostatic setup for one- and two-dimensional mapping scans in both frequency domain echo-intensity and temporal domain time-of-flight modes. The experimental results illustrated 1.03 ± 0.15λ and 2.35 ± 0.28λ on the lateral and axial minimum detectable object size. The experiments using the tunable lens demonstrate the capability to detect objects by changing the temperature in water without translating an object, source, or detector. The time-of-flight mode modality using the tunable solid-state phononic lens increases the signal-to-noise ratio compared to a conventional phononic crystal lens.

Abstract Rapid thermokinetics associated with laser-based additive manufacturing produces strong bulk crystallographic texture in the printed component. The present study identifies such a bulk texture effect on elastic anisotropy in laser powder bed fused Ti6Al4V by employing an effective bulk modulus elastography technique coupled with ultrasound shear wave velocity measurement at a frequency of 20 MHz inside the material. The combined technique identified significant attenuation of shear velocity from 3322 ± 20.12 to 3240 ± 21.01 m/s at 45 $$^\circ$$ ∘ and 90 $$^\circ$$ ∘ orientations of shear wave plane with respect to the build plane of printed block of Ti6Al4V. Correspondingly, the reduction in shear modulus from 48.46 ± 0.82 to 46.40 ± 0.88 GPa was obtained at these orientations. Such attenuation is rationalized based on the orientations of $$\alpha ^\prime$$ α ′ crystallographic variants within prior columnar $$\beta$$ β grains in additively manufactured Ti6Al4V.

The management of drinking water quality is critical to public health and can benefit from techniques and technologies that support near real-time forecasting of lake and reservoir conditions. The cyberinfrastructure (CI) needed to support forecasting has to overcome multiple challenges, which include: 1) deploying sensors at the reservoir requires the CI to extend to the network’s edge and accommodate devices with constrained network and power; 2) different lakes need different sensor modalities, deployments, and calibrations; hence, the CI needs to be flexible and customizable to accommodate various deployments; and 3) the CI requires to be accessible and usable to various stakeholders (water managers, reservoir operators, and researchers) without barriers to entry. This paper describes the CI underlying FLARE (Forecasting Lake And Reservoir Ecosystems), a novel system co-designed in an interdisciplinary manner between CI and domain scientists to address the above challenges. FLARE integrates R packages that implement the core numerical forecasting (including lake process modeling and data assimilation) with containers, overlay virtual networks, object storage, versioned storage, and event-driven Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) serverless execution. It is a flexible forecasting system that can be deployed in different modalities, including the Manual Mode suitable for end-users’ personal computers and the Workflow Mode idealmore »for cloud deployment. The paper reports on experimental data and lessons learned from the operational deployment of FLARE in a drinking water supply (Falling Creek Reservoir in Vinton, Virginia, USA). Experiments with a FLARE deployment quantify its edge-to-cloud virtual network performance and serverless execution in OpenWhisk deployments on both XSEDE-Jetstream and the IBM Cloud Functions FaaS system.« less

In this study, we introduce a novel method using longitudinal sound to detect underground soil voids to inspect underwater bed property in terms of effective bulk modulus and effective density of the material properties. The model was simulated in terms of layered material within a monostatic detection configuration. The numerical model demonstrates the feasibility of detecting an underground air void with a spatial resolution of about 0.5 λ and can differentiate a soil firmness of about 5%. The proposed technique can overcome limitations imposed by conventional techniques that use spacing-consuming sonar devices and suffer from low penetration depth and leakage of the transverse sound wave propagating in an underground fluid environment.

Abstract Practically applied techniques for ultrasonic biomedical imaging employ delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming which can resolve two objects down to 2.1 λ within the acoustic Fresnel zone. Here, we demonstrate a phononic metamaterial lens (ML) for detection of laterally subwavelength object features in tissue-like phantoms beyond the phononic crystal evanescent zone and Fresnel zone of the emitter. The ML produces metamaterial collimation that spreads 8x less than the emitting transducer. Utilizing collimation, 3.6x greater lateral resolution beyond the Fresnel zone limit was achieved. Both hard objects and tissue approximating masses were examined in gelatin tissue phantoms near the Fresnel zone limit. Lateral dimensions and separation were resolved down to 0.50 λ for hard objects, with tissue approximating masses slightly higher at 0.73 λ . The work represents the application of a metamaterial for spatial characterization, and subwavelength resolution in a biosystem beyond the Fresnel zone limit.

An acoustic metamaterial superlattice is used for the spatial and spectral deconvolution of a broadband acoustic pulse into narrowband signals with different central frequencies. The operating frequency range is located on the second transmission band of the superlattice. The decomposition of the broadband pulse was achieved by the frequency-dependent refraction angle in the superlattice. The refracted angle within the acoustic superlattice was larger at higher operating frequency and verified by numerical calculated and experimental mapped sound fields between the layers. The spatial dispersion and the spectral decomposition of a broadband pulse were studied using lateral position-dependent frequency spectra experimentally with and without the superlattice structure along the direction of the propagating acoustic wave. In the absence of the superlattice, the acoustic propagation was influenced by the usual divergence of the beam, and the frequency spectrum was unaffected. The decomposition of the broadband wave in the superlattice’s presence was measured by two-dimensional spatial mapping of the acoustic spectra along the superlattice’s in-plane direction to characterize the propagation of the beam through the crystal. About 80% of the frequency range of the second transmission band showed exceptional performance on decomposition.

The advent of 3D digital printers has led to the evolution of realistic anatomical organ shaped structures that are being currently used as experimental models for rehearsing and preparing complex surgical procedures by clinicians. However, the actual material properties are still far from being ideal, which necessitates the need to develop new materials and processing techniques for the next generation of 3D printers optimized for clinical applications. Recently, the voxelated soft matter technique has been introduced to provide a much broader range of materials and a profile much more like the actual organ that can be designed and fabricated voxel by voxel with high precision. For the practical applications of 3D voxelated materials, it is crucial to develop the novel high precision material manufacturing and characterization technique to control the mechanical properties that can be difficult using the conventional methods due to the complexity and the size of the combination of materials. Here we propose the non-destructive ultrasound effective density and bulk modulus imaging to evaluate 3D voxelated materials printed by J750 Digital Anatomy 3D Printer of Stratasys. Our method provides the design map of voxelated materials and substantially broadens the applications of 3D digital printing in the clinical researchmore »area.« less