Characterization of anisotropic acoustic metamaterial slabs

In an anisotropic acoustic metamaterial, the off-diagonal components of its effective mass density tensor should be considered in order to describe the anisotropic behavior produced by arbitrarily shaped inclusions. However, few studies have been carried out to characterize anisotropic acoustic metamaterials. In this paper, we propose a method that uses the non-diagonal effective mass density tensor to determine the behavior of anisotropic acoustic metamaterials. Our method accurately evaluates the effective properties of anisotropic acoustic metamaterials by separately dealing with slabs made of single and multiple unit cells along the thickness direction. To determine the effective properties, the reflection and transmission coefficients of an acoustic metamaterial slab are calculated, and then the wave vectors inside of the slab are determined using these coefficients. The effective material properties are finally determined by utilizing the spatial dispersion relation of the anisotropic acoustic metamaterial. Since the dispersion relation of an anisotropic acoustic metamaterial is explicitly used, its effective properties can be easily determined by only using a limited number of normal and oblique plane wave incidences into a metamaterial slab, unlike existing approaches requiring a large number of wave incidences. The validity of the proposed method is verified by conducting wave simulations for anisotropic acoustic metamaterial slabs with Z-shaped elastic inclusions of tilted principal material axes. (c) 2016 AIP Publishing LLC.