Nonlinear acoustic metamaterials

Acoustic metamaterials (AMM) have become a very active topic for research in numerous domains of engineering and science because of their promise to create materials, structures, and devices that can control acoustic wave propagation in ways that exceed the capabilities of naturally occurring or conventional composite materials. The majority of AMM research has been focused on linear behavior such as negative dynamic effective stiffness and density, cloaking, and negative refraction. One drawback of the focus on linear behavior is the restriction of the effective material properties of interest to narrow frequency bands that cannot be changed with external stimulus. Nonlinearity has been explored as a means of increasing the bandwidth of performance by enabling tunable band gaps and material configurability. Other recent work has investigated nonlinear AMM to access phenomena such as harmonic generation, non-reciprocity, enhanced energy absorption, solitons, mode hopping and conversion, chaos, and intrinsic localized modes. This talk will provide an overview of nonlinear AMM, starting with a background on AMM, then surveying existing research on the topic and its relationship to seminal works in nonlinear acoustics, and finally discussing promising avenues of future research. [Work supported by the National Science Foundation EFRI program and ARL:UT.]