Recall that for isotropic materials, the stress is given by
For a fluid, the shear modulus and the Lame constant
, where is the bulk modulus.
Therefore, for fluids,
The quantity
is the pressure in the fluid.
Taking the Fourier transform of equations (1) and (2)
we get
Also recall that, for low frequency processes,
For fluids, equations (4) becomes
From equations (3) and (5), we have
Therefore, we get the acoustic wave equation
If and only depend on and and is
independent of , then the three-dimensional gradient operator
can be replaced with the two-dimensional gradient operator
, and we get
and
Therfore, by analogy with the results from antiplane shear elasticity and TE electromagnetism, if and are both negative, we get a negative refractive index material for acoustics.
The speed of sound in an acoustic medium is given by .
The sound speed is imaginary is either or is negative
and a material with these properties appears opaque to sound waves. However,
if and are both positive or both negative, the sound
speed is real and the medium becomes transparent to acoustic waves, i.e.,
acoustic waves can propagate through the medium.
Let us now consider the propagation of acoustic waves across the interface shown in Figure 1. If the pressure is the same at points at equal distances from the interface as shown, the
vectors are reflections of each other. If is the normal to the interface, the quantity changes sign across the interface. Since also changes sign, is continuous across the interface. Hence, the boundary condition across the interface is physical.
Since this situation is analgous to the one we observed earlier for electromagnetism, the effect of a slab of negative material will be to translate a source of acoustic waves and the slab will act like a perfect lens.
Early work on negative elastic moduli can be found in Lakes01. More recent work on ultrasonic metamaterials can be found in Fang06. Consider the array of Helmholtz resonators shown in Figure 2 (an example of such a resonator in everyday life is a soda bottle which resonates when you blow over the top of the neck.) The resonator can be thought of as a spring-mass system where the air inside the cavity acts as a spring and the water
in the narrow neck acts as a mass. There is some frequency at which the spring-mass system resonates.
A model of the Helmholtz resonator is shown in Figure 3. For simplicity, we assume that each
cavity has a square cross section as do the piston arms. The cross sectional area is assumed to be . The air in each cavity is model with a spring of complex spring constant and the water in the neck is modeled as a rigid body of mass . The piston is filled with a compressible fluid with complex bulk modulus .
Let the force applied on the pistons be . Then the pressure in
the fluid is
Since the fluid transmits the pressure to the mass and the area of cross
section of the cavity is , the force applied by the fluid on the mass
is also .
Let be the force that the spring applies on the mass. By symmetry,
the same forces is applied to both cavities shown in Figure 3. Let denote the position of the piston and let be the position of the mass.
Assume harmonic time dependence of the quantities , , , and . Then
Assume that at . Then, we also have
Newton's law then implies that
Substituting equations (7) into equation (9), we
get
Also, from Hooke's law
Combining equations (10) and (11) we get
Also, from equation (6) we have
Combining equations (13) and (12) we have
The change in volume of the fluid due to the motions of the pistons and
the masses is given by
Now, from the constitutive relation for the fluid,
where is the complex bulk modulus of the fluid and is the initial volume.
Substituting equations (7) and (8) into equation (16) we get
From equations (14) and (17), eliminating ,
we get
Solving for , we have
Therefore,
By definition, the Young's modulus relates the stress to the strain. For
our model this implies that
where is a complex Young's modulus, is the change in
length and is the initial length of the region between the two pistons.
Therefore,
From equations (18) and (19) we can deduce an expression for the Young's modulus of the form
If in particular and are real (purely elastic springs with
not damping) and positive, then a plot of as a function of
has the form shown in Figure 4. So it will appear that the system will have a negative Young's modulus for frequencies higher than !
In fact, several other negative modulus materials can be envisaged.
It is common for people to use a generalized Maxwell model in linear viscoelasticity (see Figure 5). The question is: what is the relation between and ?
Recall that for a single Maxwell element (), the displacements in the
spring and the dashpot are given by
Fourier transforming these equations gives
The total displacement of the Maxwell element is
Dropping the hats, we have
Therefore, from the balance of forces (for the generalized Maxwell model)
The quantity
is the effective spring constant for the model ( is
called the relaxation time).
Similarly, for the Young's modulus and converting the sum into an integral,
we have
where is the relaxation spectrum, , and .
Therefore,
If we discretize the spectrum we get
where , , and . This implies that and for all . Clearly, viscoelastic models cannot represent negative elastic moduli and can therefore fail badly when used to model materials such as Helmholtz resonators.
In fact, for viscoelastic material models, we find that is
analytic in the entire complex plane except for isolated poles (at
intervals of ) in the negative imaginary axis. This is
contrary to what we observe for the frequency dependent models we have
dealt with so far for which causality forces the moduli to be analytic
only the upper half complex plane.
S. Zhang, L. Yin, and N.Fang. Focusing Ultrasound with an Acoustic Metamaterial Network. "Physical Review Letter",102, 194301, 2009.
N. Fang, D. Xi, J. Xu, M. Ambati, W. Srituravanich, C. Sun, and X. Zhang. Ultrasonic metamaterials with negative modulus. Nature Materials, 5:452--456, 2006.
R. Lakes, T. Lee, A. Bersie, and Y. C. Wang. Extreme damping in composite materials with negative-stiffness inclusions. Nature, 410:565--567, 2001.
Many of the examples in this lecture have been developed by Professor Graeme W. Milton [1]