Designing Materials for Mechanical Invisibility Cloaks

P. Olsson[1], F. Larsson[1], A. Khlopotin[1], S. Razanica[1]
[1]Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden
Veröffentlicht in 2012

In solid mechanics, there is considerable interest in achieving “invisibility”. The applications in mechanics include protection of structures and parts of structures from potentially harmful transient waves and steady state vibrations. A suggested large scale application is that protection against seismic waves from earthquakes could be achieved by using cloaking to re-route the waves around sensitive infrastructure. The construction of mechanical cloaks requires fine-tuning of the elastic properties of the cloaking, so-called metamaterials. We describe some results on simulations of cloaking in solid mechanics. COMSOL Multiphysics has been used to simulate different material responses. The simulations indicate that there is a potential for cloaking objects for incoming seismic waves, both regarding force and displacement.