No Arabic abstract
An intelligent radome utilizing composite metamaterial structures is presented and investigated in this article, which can realize energy isolation and asymmetric propagation of electromagnetic (EM) wave self-adaptively by controlling states of PIN diodes. The whole structure mainly consists of a broadband polarization-sensitive polarization converter (PC) and an active frequency selective rasorber (AFSR) switching between a transmission mode and absorption mode which is used as an energy-selective surface (ESS). Among them, the function of the PC is to make the EM waves transmit asymmetrically, and the purpose of AFSR is to make the high-power waves be reflected or absorbed, which depends on the polarization type of the wave. Thus, the radome can realize both asymmetric propagations of EM wave and electromagnetic shielding. The equivalent circuit models (ECM) and parametric studies are considered to explain the physical operating mechanism of PC and AFSR. The fabricated structure with 7*7 unit cells is experimentally demonstrated and the measured results agree with simulated results well. Considering the distinctive characteristic of self-actuation, the presented concept has the potential application in electromagnetic stealth and HPEMWs shielding to protect communication devices.
Collagen is the key protein of connective tissue (i.e., skin, tendons and ligaments, cartilage, among others) accounting for 25% to 35% of the whole-body protein content, and entitled of conferring mechanical stability. This protein is also a fundamental building block of bone due to its excellent mechanical properties together with carbonated hydroxyapatite minerals. While the mechanical resilience and viscoelasticity have been studied both in vitro and in vivo from the molecule to tissue level, wave propagation properties and energy dissipation have not yet been deeply explored, in spite of being crucial to understand the vibration dynamics of collagenous structures (e.g., eardrum, cochlear membranes) upon impulsive loads. By using a bottom-up atomistic modelling approach, here we study a collagen peptide under two distinct impulsive displacement loads, including longitudinal and transversal inputs. Using a one-dimensional string model as a model system, we investigate the roles of hydration and load direction on wave propagation along the collagen peptide and the related energy dissipation. We find that wave transmission and energy-dissipation strongly depend on the loading direction. Also, the hydrated collagen peptide can dissipate five times more energy than dehydrated one. Our work suggests a distinct role of collagen in term of wave transmission of different tissues such as tendon and eardrum. This study can step towards understanding the mechanical behaviour of collagen upon transient loads, impact loading and fatigue, and designing biomimetic and bio-inspired materials to replace specific native tissues such as the tympanic membrane.
We present a numerical study on an enhanced periodic auxetic metamaterial. Rotating squares mechanism allied to precompression induced buckling give these elastic structures exotic properties. The static properties of the reference structure and the enhanced ones are first compared. After numerical analysis to ascertain the differences between several band calculation methods, we demonstrate the effect of precompression issued stress field on the dispersion diagram of the metamaterial. An optimization study is then performed to assess the potential vibration isolation improvement obtained with the new design. As a result, the bandgaps widths and range are found to be greatly increased by the geometric modifications proposed.
Electromagnetic absorbers have drawn increasing attention in many areas. A series of plasmonic and metamaterial structures can work as efficient narrow band absorbers due to the excitation of plasmonic or photonic resonances, providing a great potential for applications in designing selective thermal emitters, bio-sensing, etc. In other applications such as solar energy harvesting and photonic detection, the bandwidth of light absorbers is required to be quite broad. Under such a background, a variety of mechanisms of broadband/multiband absorption have been proposed, such as mixing multiple resonances together, exciting phase resonances, slowing down light by anisotropic metamaterials, employing high loss materials and so on.
We apply the transformation-optics approach to the design of a metamaterial radome that can extend the scanning angle of a phased-array antenna. For moderate enhancement of the scanning angle, via suitable parameterization and optimization of the coordinate transformation, we obtain a design that admits a technologically viable, robust and potentially broadband implementation in terms of thin-metallic-plate inclusions. Our results, validated via finite-element-based numerical simulations, indicate an alternative route to the design of metamaterial radomes which does not require negative-valued and/or extreme constitutive parameters.
Mechanical cloaks are materials engineered to manipulate the elastic response around objects to make them indistinguishable from their homogeneous surroundings. Typically, methods based on material-parameter transformations are used to design optical, thermal and electric cloaks. However, they are not applicable in designing mechanical cloaks, since continuum-mechanics equations are not form-invariant under general coordinate transformations. As a result, existing design methods for mechanical cloaks have so far been limited to a narrow selection of voids with simple shapes. To address this challenge, we present a systematic, data-driven design approach to create mechanical cloaks composed of aperiodic metamaterials using a large pre-computed unit cell database. Our method is flexible to allow the design of cloaks with various boundary conditions, different shapes and numbers of voids, and different homogeneous surroundings. It enables a concurrent optimization of both topology and properties distribution of the cloak. Compared to conventional fixed-shape solutions, this results in an overall better cloaking performance, and offers unparalleled versatility. Experimental measurements on 3D-printed structures further confirm the validity of the proposed approach. Our research illustrates the benefits of data-driven approaches in quickly responding to new design scenarios and resolving the computational challenge associated with multiscale designs of aperiodic metamaterials.