Antiplane elastic wave cloaking using metamaterials, homogenization and hyperelasticity

• We model cloaks in the context of antiplane elasticity.
• The layered medium method of Torrent and Sanchez-Dehesa is applied.
• We construct Mooney–Rivlin hyperelastic cloaks.
• The scattering cross section is plotted to assess effectiveness of cloaks.

We consider the problem of how to cloak objects from antiplane elastic waves using two alternative techniques. The first is the use of a layered metamaterial in the spirit of the work of Torrent and Sanchez-Dehesa (2008) who considered acoustic cloaks, motivated by homogenization theories, whilst the second is the use of a hyperelastic cloak in the spirit of the work of Parnell et al. (2012). We extend the hyperelastic cloaking theory to the case of a Mooney–Rivlin material since this is often considered to be a more realistic constitutive model of rubber-like media than the neo-Hookean case studied by Parnell et al. (2012), certainly at the deformations required to produce a significant cloaking effect. Although not perfect, the Mooney–Rivlin material appears to be a reasonable hyperelastic cloak. This is clearly encouraging for applications. We quantify the effectiveness of the various cloaks considered by plotting the scattering cross section as a function of frequency, noting that this would be zero for a perfect cloak.