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Gradient acoustic metasurfaces are a class of subwavelength metamaterials that provide unprecedented opportunities to control the direction of reflected and refracted waves, including negative angles in accordance with the diffraction theory and generalized law of reflection. This opens new possibilities in designing metasurfaces for many practical applications in wave engineering. In this work, locally resonant acoustic metamaterials are considered as the building units of the metasurface, which owe their favorable properties to local resonances at the microstructural level. Non-trivial reflection angles are realized by introducing suitable phase modulations along the wave path. The required phase shift is achieved through the variation of geometrical and material parameters of the metamaterial unit cells. The negative reflection of ultrasound waves is demonstrated numerically by means of a finite-element analysis of a fluid-metasurface-solid structure. The results of this study provide new insights and detailed guidelines for designing metasurfaces for controllable acoustic wave reflection.

Martensite/ferrite (M/F) interface damage largely controls failure of dual-phase (DP) steels. In order to predict the failure and assess the ductility of DP steels, accurate models for the M/F interfacial zones are needed. Several M/F interface models have been proposed in the literature, which however do not incorporate the underlying microphysics. It has been recently suggested that (lath) martensite substructure boundary sliding dominates the M/F interface damage initiation and therefore should be taken into account. Considering the computationally infeasibility of direct numerical simulations of statistically representative DP steel microstructures, while explicitly resolving the interface microstructures and the sliding activity, a novel multi-scale approach is developed in this work. Two scales are considered: the DP steel mesostructure consisting of multiple lath martensite islands embedded in a ferrite matrix, and the microscopic M/F interfacial zone unit cell resolving the martensite substructure. Based on the emerging microscopic damage initiation pattern, an effective indicator for the M/F interface damage initiation is determined from the interface microstructural unit cell response, along with the effective sliding in this unit cell. Relating these two effective quantities for different interface microstructural configurations leads to an effective mesoscale model relating the interface damage indicator to the sliding activity of the martensite island in terms of the mesoscopic kinematics. This microphysics-based M/F interface damage indicator model, which could not be envisioned a-priori, is fully identified from a set of interfacial unit cell simulations, thus enabling the efficient prediction of interface damage initiation at the mesoscale. The capability of the developed effective model to predict the mesoscopic M/F interface damage initiation is demonstrated on an example of a realistic DP steel mesostructure.

Locally resonant acoustic metamaterial (LRAM) panels are excellent candidates for the low-frequency flexural wave attenuation in thin structures. To enable the efficient analysis and design of LRAM beam/shell structural elements for practical applications, a computational homogenization method for modelling wave propagation phenomena in LRAM panels is presented in this work. The approach is based on the notion of a relaxed separation of scales, which tailors the methodology to the phenomena governed by local resonators embedded in a host medium. The macroscopic LRAM panel is modelled as a thin continuum beam/shell described by proper structural kinematics and momentum balance relations. At the microscale, a LRAM unit cell is considered with lamina-wise in-plane boundary conditions and zero out-of-plane tractions, representing the free top and bottom surfaces of the macroscopic LRAM panel. Under the assumption of linear elasticity, in the relaxed separation of scales regime, the microscale unit cell problem can be represented by the superposition of a static and a dynamic problem, hereby enabling a significant model reduction. As a result, the macroscale effective material properties can be computed once and for all off-line for a given unit cell. In addition, a new macroscale evolution equation emerges describing the effect of the microscale internal dynamics on the macroscopic fields through the introduction of new macroscale enrichment variables, which reflect the modal amplitudes of localized microscale modes. The proposed homogenization methodology reveals a high level of accuracy and numerical efficiency compared to the reference direct numerical simulation (DNS) for all relevant analyses: computation of real and complex dispersion spectra for an infinite LRAM panel, as well as steady-state frequency response and transient behaviour for a finite LRAM panel.

This paper presents a computational frequency-domain boundary value analysis of acoustic metamaterials and phononic crystals based on a general homogenization framework, which features a novel definition of the macro-scale fields based on the Floquet-Bloch average in combination with a family of characteristic projection functions leading to a generalized macro-scale continuum. Restricting to 1D elastodynamics and the frequency-domain response for the sake of compactness, the boundary value problem on the generalized macro-scale continuum is elaborated. Several challenges are identified, in particular the non-uniqueness in selection of the boundary conditions for the homogenized continuum and the presence of spurious short wave solutions. To this end, procedures for the determination of the homogenized boundary conditions and mitigation of the spurious solutions are proposed. The methodology is validated against the direct numerical simulation on an example periodic 2-phase composite structure.

With the aim of developing high-performance locally resonant metamaterials, the effect of nonlinear hyperelastic interactions between a rubberlike elastomeric local resonator and the host matrix is investigated. The results reveal a new emergent physical phenomenon not previously reported within the framework of elastoacoustic metamaterials: The appearance of a half subharmonic attenuation zone complementing the local resonance band gap around the fundamental frequency. Evidence of the emergent attenuation zone is provided by direct numerical simulations as well as semianalytical developments via the method of multiple scales. The analyses demonstrate that, in the considered nonlinear locally resonant metamaterial, the combined effects of autoparametric and local resonance induce saturation of the primary wave at certain conditions and, subsequently, promote energy exchange from a primary propagating wave to an evanescent subharmonic wave, giving rise to an additional attenuation zone. This opens new possibilities for the design of passive filtering devices for elastoacoustic waves.

Acoustic metafoams are novel materials recently proposed for low frequency sound attenuation. The design of their microstructure is based on the combination of standard acoustic foams with locally resonant acoustic metamaterials. This results in improved sound attenuation properties due to the interaction between viscothermal dissipation effects and the local resonance effects at the pore level. In this paper, the non-standard behaviour of such a metafoam with a complex two-phase microstructure is analysed through a multiscale approach. The macroscopic problem is described by general balance equations and at the microscopic scale a detailed representation of the microstructure is considered. The frequency dependent effective properties are used to explain the extraordinary acoustic performance. The homogenisation approach is also validated using direct numerical simulations, showing that the homogenisation technique is adequate in modelling both viscothermal dissipation and the local resonance effect within the metafoam microstructure.

Acoustic foams are commonly used for sound attenuation purposes. Due to their porous microstructure, they efficiently dissipate energy through the air flowing in and out of the pores at high frequencies. However, the low frequency performance is still challenging for foams, even after optimisation of their microstructural design. A new, innovative, approach is therefore needed to further improve the acoustic behaviour of poroelastic materials. The expanding field of locally resonant acoustic metamaterials shows some promising examples where resonating masses incorporated within the microstructure lead to a significant enhancement of low frequency wave attenuation. In this paper, a combination of traditional poroelastic materials with locally resonant units embedded inside the pores is proposed, showing the pathway towards designing acoustic metafoams: poroelastic materials with properties beyond standard foams. The conceptual microstructural design of an idealised unit cell presented in this work consists of a cubic pore representing a foam unit cell with an embedded micro-resonator and filled with a viscothermal fluid (air). Analysis of complex dispersion diagrams and numerical transmission simulations demonstrate a clear improvement in wave attenuation achieved by such a microstructure. It is believed that this demonstrates the concept, which serves the future development of novel poroelastic materials.

This paper demonstrates the application of a recently developed enriched micro-inertial continuum based homogenization framework towards numerical dispersion and boundary value problem analyses of local resonance metamaterials exhibiting sub-wavelength negative stiffness and double negative effects (i.e. simultaneous negative effective mass density and stiffness). This is a novel development since homogenized structural dynamic analyses that specifically incorporate negative stiffness effects have not yet been extensively explored. The proposed methodology is successful in approximating the negative stiffness effect to a certain degree. Accordingly, an appropriate error estimation procedure based on dispersion analyses is proposed to identify the limits of the reliability of the homogenized model. The resulting methodology provides a highly efficient framework for the analysis of double negative metamaterial problems involving a non-trivial macroscopic loading, the influence of the applied boundary conditions, and a complex unit cell design. This is illustrated through a case study involving the refraction analysis of a double negative metamaterial prism.

Locally resonant metamaterials (LRMs) controlling low-frequency waves due to resonant scattering are usually characterized by narrow band gaps (BGs) and a poor wave filtering performance. To remedy this shortcoming, multiresonant metamaterial structures with closely located BGs have been proposed and widely studied. However, the analysis is generally limited to two-dimensional (2D) structures neglecting the finite height of any real resonator. The aim of this paper is the comparison of the wave dispersion for two- and three-dimensional (3D) metamaterial models and evaluation of the applicability ranges of 2D results. Numerical study reveals that dual-resonant structures with cylindrical inclusions possess only a single (compared to two in the 2D case) BG for certain height-to-width ratios. In contrast, the wave dispersion in metamaterials with multiple spherical resonators can be accurately evaluated using a 2D approximation, enabling a significant simplification of resource-consuming 3D models.

Lath martensite reveals a specific hierarchical subgrain structure, with laths, blocks and packets of particular crystallography. The presence of interlath retained austenite layers has been reported in the literature. This paper investigates the potential influence of the interlath retained austenite on the mechanical behaviour of lath martensite subgrains. To this purpose, a martensite grain substructure is modelled using a crystal plasticity framework, with a BCC lath - FCC austenite bicrystal at the fine scale. The main novel contribution of this work is the validation of the hypothesis on the role of the interlath retained austenite in lath martensite using the experimental results reported in the literature. The main features of the experimentally observed deformation behaviour (stress-strain curve, slip activity and roughness pattern) are qualitatively well reproduced by the model. It is shown that the presence of austenite interlath films has the potential to remarkably enhance the local deformation of martensite. In spite of its minor volume fraction, it plays a major role in the orientation dependent mechanical behaviour of the aggregate. It is also shown that if the presence of interlath austenite is neglected, the observed experimental flow curves are not captured.