Shell-type acoustic metasurface and arc-shape carpet cloak.

We systematically propose a thin shell-type acoustic metasurface, which could be used to design a carpet cloak that closely covers an arc-shaped object, therefore providing the necessary support for hiding an object with any arbitrary shape. To facilitate the experimental measurement, however, the work here starts with some rotary spherical shell-type and ellipsoidal shell-type cell structures. The measured and calculated sound transmission loss (STL) results of these structures suggest that the sound insulation performances of the shell-type structure are quite different from those of the plate-type structure, indicating a possible break in the shape of the classical sound insulation curve. Considering also that cylindrical shell structures are more widely used in practice than the rotary shell structures, a number of two-dimensional bilayer cylindrical and elliptic cylindrical shell structures were, therefore, designed in this assay. Due to the asymmetry of the structure, the shell-type cells could exhibit bianisotropic sound absorption, reflection and effective parameters. Furthermore, the stiffness of the thin shell structure changed nonlinearly with the changing of the radius of curvature, with a wing shape tendency. In addition, a bilayer cylindrical shell-type acoustic metasurface and an arc-shaped carpet acoustic cloak were successively designed, wherein the phased compensation of differently shaped cell structures could be adjusted by means of a new engineering iso-phase design method. This work could provide the necessary guidance to extend existing results in the field of membrane- and plate-type acoustic metamaterials for shell-type structures, and the realization of the arc-shaped cloak could provide support for the design of a carpet acoustical cloak for use with arbitrary shapes.

Bilayer synergetic coupling double negative acoustic metasurface and cloak.

In this paper, we propose a bilayer plate-type lightweight double negative metasurface based on a new synergetic coupling design concept, by which the perfect absorption, double negative bands, free manipulation of phase shifts with a 2π span and acoustic cloak can be successively realized. Firstly, the synergetic behavior between resonant and anti-resonant plates is presented to construct a bilayer unit in which each component respectively provides a pre-defined function in realizing the perfect absorption. Based on this bilayer structure, a double negative band with simultaneously negative effective mass density and bulk modulus is obtained, which, as a metasurface, can obtain continuous phase shifts almost completely covering a 2π range, thus facilitating the design of a three-dimensional (3D) acoustic cloak. In addition, based on this strong sound absorption concept, a two-dimensional (2D) omnidirectional broadband acoustical dark skin, covering between 800 to 6000 Hz, is also demonstrated through the proposed bilayer plate-type structure form. The proposed design concepts and metasurfaces have widespread potential application values in strong sound attenuation, filtering, superlens, imaging, cloak, and extraordinary wave steering, in which the attributes of strong absorption, double negative parameters or continuous phase shifts with full 2π span are required to realize the expected extraordinary physical features.

Effect of microwave-assisted dry heating with xanthan on normal and waxy corn starches.

Normal corn starch (CS) and waxy corn starch (WCS) were impregnated with xanthan gum (1% based on starch) and heat-treated using a microwave in a dry state for 0, 4, or 6min (CS-X0, CS-X4, CS-X6, WCS-X0, WCS-X4, WCS-X6), respectively. Effects of the microwave-assisted dry heating (MADH) on pasting, morphological, and structural properties were evaluated. The results revealed that the viscosity of both the CS and WCS with xanthan increased compared with untreated samples after MADH, and the effect on WCS was more obvious. The syneresis values showed that the water-holding ability of CS-X6 and WCS-X6 increased, and that value of CS was lower than that of WCS after MADH with xanthan. The MADH with xanthan reduced the To, Tc, Tp, and ΔH values of both the CS and WCS. After MADH, the particle morphology of the starch-xanthan connected more densely, especially WCS, and the gelatinized samples exhibited a strong and smooth laminar structure. The Fourier transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) displayed that the absorption peak width of both CS-X6 and WCS-X6 became larger. X-ray diffraction showed that the crystallinity of CS-X6 and WCS-X6 decreased slightly as a result of MADH, and the crystalline pattern remained A-type.