Acoustic and Mechanical Metamaterials for Various Applications

About this Research Topic

Background

Metamaterials belong to an important category of advanced functional materials, the goal of which is to use finely designed artificial microstructures to replace uniform materials continuously distributed in the traditional equipment and devices, to develop devices and equipment with more diversified functions and better performance. By employing the advantages of microstructure design, the equipment design would be developed in the direction of refinement, multi-functional integration and individualization. Therefore, it has extensive application value in a variety of industrial products and engineering activities. Especially for acoustic and mechanical metamaterials, these artificial microstructures can be used to achieve negative or near-zero unconventional equivalent parameters and realize various strange mechanical wave manipulation functions. Moreover, mechanical wave can be manipulated by sub-wavelength structures whose size is smaller than the relevant wavelength, thus promoting the lightweight and miniaturization of equipment. Therefore, it can be widely used in low-frequency vibration / noise control, acoustic / elastic wave stealth, focusing / imaging, sensing / detection in many fields such as mechanical engineering, aeronautics and astronautics, marine engineering, power engineering, civil engineering, electrical and electronic engineering and biomedical engineering.

Acoustic and mechanical metamaterials have been developed for more than 20 years, but there are few successful cases in application. A main reason for this situation is that many problems those need to be considered in engineering applications have not been fully considered in the laboratory stage. In other words, there are a lack of research works those can play a bridge role to well connect the theoretical research and engineering applications. For example, the working conditions or the applied boundary conditions and loads of the structure in most laboratory studies have great deviations from the actual application, resulting in many excellent physical or mechanical properties those cannot be realized in the application. In addition, due to the influence of manufacturing technology and processing accuracy, the actual structure fabricated according to the theoretical design parameters will inevitably deviate from the theoretical design value, and the physical or mechanical properties will also fail to meet the expected design requirements. To this end, this topic hopes to collect research works on acoustic and mechanical metamaterials for various applications, guide researchers in related fields to overcome the difficulties in the application of acoustics and mechanical metamaterials and concentrate the strength of researchers in multiple fields to effectively promote extensive engineering applications of acoustic and mechanical metamaterials.

Topics addressed in this Research Topic may include, but are not limited to:
• Acoustic/elastic/mechanical metamaterials and metasurfaces for applications
• New approaches and structures/devices for acoustic and elastic waves controlling
• Artificial composite structures for various applications.
• Multifunctional design of sonic crystal and metamaterials
• Tunable, reconfigurable, and programmable metamaterials for applications

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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