A novel aseismic method using seismic metasurface design with mound structures.

We explore a seismic metasurface (SMS) design to control Rayleigh wave propagation for the earthquake resistance of critical buildings. An SMS is designed by assembling an array of soil mound units with different inclination angles to mold an accurate phase shift of the incoming seismic Rayleigh waves. We propose three SMSs to realize the three effects of forming Rayleigh wave fields: beam splitting, arbitrary convex trajectory bending, and wavefront focusing. The results demonstrate that the designed SMSs can remove more than 90% of the incident wave energy before it reaches the target buildings. Our compact SMSs, which feature low cost and are easy to implement, constitute an active earthquake-resistance method in civil engineering and are potentially useful in applications such as energy collection, nondestructive testing, and signal modulation for surface waves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]