Optimization of an acoustic leaky-wave antenna based on acoustic metamaterial

In recent years, an increasing number of pioneering studies have been carried out in the field of acoustic metamaterials, following the path of electromagnetic metamaterials. These artificial engineered materials are designed in such a way so as to achieve new macroscopic properties, like negative refraction, that are not readily present in nature. While the design and the fabrication of these artificial materials is a hot topic among scientists in different fields of physics such as photonic, electromagnetic, acoustic and recently mechanic, an important part of the scientific research is now oriented towards the identification of actual applications for these structures. As the novel idea of metamaterial was first developed in the electromagnetic realm and for the microwave frequency range, it is somehow more mature in these fields than in acoustics. Metamaterial applications are now widely developed in electromagnetics especially for the design of new antenna. Among other examples, metamaterial concepts are aiming at reducing the coupling between two adjacent radiating elements of the array and increasing the operating bandwidth of radiating elements. It is also used for phase compensation in microwave transistors, and many more applications are rising in the recent literature. In year 2009, in analogy with electromagnetic transmission line metamaterial, our group proposed a concept of acoustic transmission line metamaterial, consisting of a waveguide periodically loaded with membranes along the duct, and transverse open channels (denoted “stubs”). Based on our proposed structure and in analogy with applications of transmission line electromagnetic metamaterials, researchers proposed the idea of an acoustic counterpart to the “backward wave antenna”. These antennas or radiating devices have a very special property such that the radiation angle or the directivity changes with the frequency. In this article, a comprehensive, step by step, design methodology for acoustic backward wave antenna is presented. For this purpose we use the model proposed in our 2009 publication for acoustic transmission line metamaterial, but we focus the discussion on the optimization of the antenna performance. We also propose some closed form formulas for the practical design of such devices, and a formal validation of the structure is proposed using Comsol Multiphysics.

Electromagnetic Inspired Acoustic Metamaterials

Seyyed Hussein Seyyed Esfahlani

This thesis deals with electromagnetic inspired acoustic metamaterials, enabling sound-matter interactions in different wave scenarios that include propagation, guided-waves, radiation, refraction, reflection and transmission. To this end, a particular emphasis is placed on introducing novel applications for acoustic metamaterials operating on each one of the aforementioned wave scenarios. A few years ago, metamaterials have been introduced as a new class of composite artificial materials, engineered to produce unusual effective material properties not readily available in nature. Electromagnetic metamaterials are probably the oldest class of metamaterials, being nowadays in the process of reaching maturity and being proposed for interesting commercial applications. On the other hand, as in most young but not yet mature emerging fields of science, acoustic metamaterials are still providing lots of fertile and unexplored ground for research and study. Despite many inherent physical differences, the propagation of electromagnetic and acoustic waves are both governed by a similar mathematical model, the so-called Helmholtz wave equation. The main purpose of this work is to leverage this amazing similarity by translating recent advances in electromagnetic metamaterials into their corresponding, previously unseen, applications in acoustics. The first contribution of this thesis is to adapt the classic electromagnetic transmission-line theory to allow the design of acoustic metamaterials. The proposed circuit-based theory finds a direct application in the design of composite right/left hand transmission-line metamaterials, which yield novel guided-wave applications for acoustic metamaterials. Then, the developed theory is leveraged to model and achieve optimal design of different acoustic metamaterial-based devices, such as leaky-wave antennas and reflector-type metasurfaces. The second part of the thesis spins around acoustic leaky-wave antennas and their different functionalities, showing that they are able to act as acoustic dispersive prisms in the refraction mode and as acoustic single sensor direction finder in the radiation mode. Studying reflection phenomena in sound-metasurface interactions constitutes the next part of this thesis, where a membrane-capped cavity is introduced performing as an ultra-thin unit-cell for reflective acoustic metasurfaces. This leads to exciting applications of the concept, like acoustic reflectarray antennas and acoustic metasurface skin-cloaks Finally, the last part of this thesis deals with transmission phenomena in acoustic metasurfaces and, especially, in orbital angular momentum metasurfaces. This concept results in the design of an innovative labyrinthine-type helicoidal unit-cell that is used for phase coding a surface and transforming impinging acoustic wavefronts into transmitted helical wavefronts.

EPFL2017

3D analysis and optimization of microwave circuits by the method of moments

Francisco Jesus Nunez

The design and minaturization of microwave circuits involves the analysis and optimization of a large varity of structures, which, in general, are based on arbritrary objects embedded in also arbritary media. The most common situation is found when optimizing terminal antennas, whose main constraint is the antenna's volume, which must be fitted into a specified space, which in general is the phone or laptop case. This kind of antennas can also include stratified media, oblique metallizations, dielectric objects, waveguide components, in their definition making their analysis more difficult from the numeric point of view. The complete treatment of this kind of problems has been performed traditionally using Finite Differences or Finite Elements software, while it is more rare to find Method of Moments implementations for the solution of this kind of general problems. The Method of Moments has a certain number of advantages as the inclusion of radiation conditions or stratified media in the Green's function of the problem. Due to this it is possible to mesh only the surfaces or boundary conditions that are not included in the Green's function definition, obtaining, for instance, a more natural radiation boundary condition compared to other fullwave methods. The other big concern is the optimization of this kind of structures. In general the structures we are dealing with in this work can have very irregular shapes, in order to fit within the required volume constraints. The traditional optimizations techniques based on the gradient or conjugated gradient are not efficient when optimizing functions containning multiple minima and a large search space, which is the case in the optimization of terminal antennas. When miniaturizing terminal antennas or just a simple microstrip filter, the number of unknowns can be very large, and the different optimization variables can vary within wide limits in the search space. In this situation the Genetic Algorithms are ideal for seeking the global optimum solution of our problem. This work covers the analysis and optimization of microwave circuits, including antennas and filters in microstrip and waveguide technologies, paying more attention to the implementation of the Method of Moments (MoM) in conjugation with the Mixed Potential Integral Equation (MPIE) and Electric/Magnetic Field Integral Equation (EFIE/MFIE). The work has been split into 3 main goals: The analysis of 3 dimensional structures in stratified media, including arbritary shaped dielectric bodies using the Method of Moments, (MPIE,EFIE,MFIE). The analysis of shielded environments and more precisely the analysis of retangular waveguide cavities with the Method of Moments. The implementation of several optimization techniques, emcompassed in the frame of genetic algorithms, for the design and miniaturization of terminal antennas and microstrip filters. Some relevant examples linked to the efficiency and accuracy of the different methods and techiques explained in this work are included in each chapter, yielding to practical results suitable to be used in real life design problems. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: In Chapter 2 we have developed the interpolation of 3D Green's function to the general solution of dielectric objects embedded in multilayered media. The interpolation method itself is preceeded by a spectral extraction of the quasi-static terms. This technique, very often applied in complex images techniques, has been applied to our specific Green's function problem yielding very good results in terms of accuracy and Green's function computation time. Another contribution, also emcompassed in Chapter 2, is the integration of the static part of the field dyadic G̿EM, performed by splitting the field dyadic into TM and TE components, allowing then an analytical integration of the dyadic terms in stratified media. In the frame of shielded environments in Chapter 3, the most important contribution is the extension of Ewald's acceleration technique to full electric and magnetic problems, allowing the acceleration of the field dyadic G̿EM and thus permit the extension of the MoM to the simulation of arbritary metallic shapes coupled to apertures through Ewald's approach. In Chapter 4 the most important contribution is the implementation of a Bayesian optimiser based on the estimation of probability made by dependencies trees. The dependency tree based method found in [1] and later in [2] has been adapted to the terminal antenna miniaturization yielding to excellent results in optimisation time and quality of the solution provided by the optimiser. Our implementation of the dependency tree method was found to be better than the traditional method used in this kind of problems. Chapter 4 contains also an implementation of the growing cells method presented in [3] for the specific problem of optimising pseudo periodic structures, like microwave filters, yielding to a powerful interpolating method which accelerates the optimisation process of microwaves devices whose fitness response is very time consuming.

EPFL2006

Acoustic dispersive prism

Sami Driss Karkar, Hervé Lissek, Juan Ramon Mosig, Seyyed Hussein Seyyed Esfahlani

The optical dispersive prism is a well-studied element, which allows separating white light into its constituent spectral colors, and stands in nature as water droplets. In analogy to this definition, the acoustic dispersive prism should be an acoustic device with capability of splitting a broadband acoustic wave into its constituent Fourier components. However, due to the acoustical nature of materials as well as the design and fabrication difficulties, there is neither any natural acoustic counterpart of the optical prism, nor any artificial design reported so far exhibiting an equivalent acoustic behaviour. Here, based on exotic properties of the acoustic transmission-line metamaterials and exploiting unique physical behaviour of acoustic leaky-wave radiation, we report the first acoustic dispersive prism, effective within the audible frequency range 800 Hz - 1300 Hz. The dispersive nature, and consequently the frequency-dependent refractive index of the metamaterial are exploited to split the sound waves towards different and frequency-dependent directions. Meanwhile, the leaky-wave nature of the structure facilitates the sound wave radiation into the ambient medium.