A single-phase elastic hyperbolic metamaterial with anisotropic mass density

Wave propagation can be manipulated at a deep subwavelength scale through the locally resonant metamaterial that possesses unusual effective material properties. Hyperlens due to metamaterial's anomalous anisotropy can lead to superior-resolution imaging. In this paper, a single-phase elastic metamaterial with strongly anisotropic effective mass density has been designed. The proposed metamaterial utilizes the independently adjustable locally resonant motions of the subwavelengthscale microstructures along the two principal directions. High anisotropy in the effective mass densities obtained by the numerical-based effective medium theory can be found and even have opposite signs. For practical applications, shunted piezoelectric elements are introduced into the microstructure to tailor the effective mass density in a broad frequency range. Finally, to validate the design, an elastic hyperlens made of the single-phase hyperbolic metamaterial is proposed with subwavelength longitudinal wave imaging illustrated numerically. The proposed single-phase hyperbolic metamaterial has many promising applications for high resolution damage imaging in nondestructive evaluation and structural health monitoring. (C) 2016 Acoustical Society of America.