Audible Sound Sensing Enhancement via Structural Coupled Designs of Broadband Metamaterial

Acoustic sensors play an important part in military, scientific, and industrial applications. Current audible sound sensing performance is mainly limited by the minimum detectable pressure of the sensor material and the energy transmission efficiency of the metamaterial component. Conventional approaches to improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) mainly focus on complex sensor design and modification of transducer material. For example, through tuning the back volume size of a microphone system, combining the sensing material and electrode configurations, and stacking the cellular polypropylene films, the SNR of the piezoelectric sensors gets improved around 9 dB, 10 dB and 14 dB, respectively. The next generation of acoustic sensors requires advances in sensing behaviors to realize high-efficiency signal detection and acoustic communication in a wide working bandwidth. A practical solution is to enhance the detection limit of an audible sensing device with additional amplification components and bring in impedance matching designs for high-refractive-index metamaterials containing complex internal structures. It should be noted that the method is compatible with previous studies of sensor designing which can be considered as a further improvement for acoustic sensing performance.

In this thesis, impedance-gradient metamaterials with structural coupled designs (SCDs) are developed and investigated to increase the overall energy efficiency and improve the audible sound sensing ability of a measurement device. First, designing strategies are proposed for impedance matching in metamaterials based on the analogy of matching transformer in transmission line theory. Compared to traditional impedance-matched designs with specific geometrical parameters, the more general strategy provides an opportunity to improve the matching performance through analyzing the impedance distribution and the theoretical transmission spectrum. Different matching designs present unique acoustic characteristics including bandwidth, reflection coefficient, and the pattern of the reflection spectrum, which are waited to be applied for metamaterials.

The design, experimental demonstration, and numerical simulation are described for the characterizations of transmission efficiency and wavefront modulation realized by impedance-matched metamaterials and metasurfaces. For two-dimensional space-coiling metamaterial and three-dimensional helical metamaterial, modified structures with SCDs present an energy transmittance up to at least 60% in the frequency range of 1-7 kHz and 2-6 kHz, which is still much wider compared with recent studies. Because of enhanced energy efficiency, acoustic sensing performances achieved via metamaterial components with structural coupled designs are also improved over a wide bandwidth, compared with classic acoustic waveguides. Their maximum SNR enhancements are 12.13 dB and 11.55 dB based on experimental measurements, proving a more effective way to tune the sensing ability compared to conventional methods on sensors. From characterizations of wavefront modulation with positive or negative refraction, more than 6 dB SNR improvement is obtained owing to different impedance matching phenomena for meta-units.

Finally, based on impedance-matched designs, the quarter-wavelength acoustic resonator and the anisotropic sonic crystals are presented for broadband sound pressure amplification. The two metamaterial-enhanced sensing systems provide broadband improvements of SNR with incident signals below the detection limit of the measurement device, where the maximum value is 15.49 dB and 14.2 dB, respectively. Through the modification with SCD, the bandwidth of the amplification resonator is improved to 2468.1 Hz which is much larger than previous studies of modified resonators with acoustic coupling. Therefore, by selecting proper amplification metamaterial structure, the sensing performance of a measurement device gets largely improved which is superior to the conventional approaches with complex sensor designs and material modification. These results advance the use of impedance-matched metamaterials and related acoustic components for improved sensing behaviors and exhibit potentials for realizing multifunctional sensor networks.

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