Acoustic cloak based on Bézier scatterers.

Among the different approaches proposed to design acoustic cloaks, the one consisting on the use of an optimum distribution of discrete scatters surrounding the concealing object has been successfully tested. The feasibility of acoustic cloaks mainly depends on the number and shape of the scatterers surrounding the object to be cloaked. This work presents a method allowing the reduction of the number of discrete scatterers by optimizing their external shape, which is here defined by a combination of cubic Bézier curves. Based on scattering cancellation, a two-dimensional directional cloak consisting of just 20 Bézier scatters has been designed, fabricated and experimentally characterized. The method of fundamental solutions has been implemented to calculate the interaction of an incident plane wave with scatterers of arbitrary shape. The acoustic cloak here proposed shows a performance, in terms of averaged visibility, similar to that consisting of 120 scatterers with equal circular cross sections. The operational frequency of the proposed cloak is 5940 Hz with a bandwidth of about 110 Hz.

Design and demonstration of an acoustic right-angle bend.

In this paper, a broadband acoustic right-angle bend device in air is designed, fabricated and experimentally characterized. Perforated panels with various hole-sizes are used to construct the bend structure. Both the simulated and experimental results verify that the acoustic beam can be rotated effectively through the acoustic bend in a wide frequency range. This model may have potential applications in some areas such as sound absorption and acoustic detection in elbow pipes.

Design and demonstration of an underwater acoustic carpet cloak.

The carpet cloak, which is designed to hide the objects placed on a reflecting surface, has become a topic of considerable interest. Inspired by those theoretical works, the experimental realization of acoustic carpet cloak in air host has been reported. However, due to the difficulty in obtaining the unit cell in reality, the underwater carpet cloak still remains in simulation thus far. Here, we design and fabricate a realizable underwater acoustic carpet cloak. By introducing a scaling factor, the structure of the carpet cloak, which is comprised of layered brass plates, is greatly simplified at the cost of some impedance match. The experimental results demonstrate a good performance of the proposed carpet cloak in a wide frequency range. Our work paves the way for future applications in the practical underwater devices.