Antiplane elastic wave propagation in pre-stressed periodic structures; tuning, band gap switching and invariance

The effect of nonlinear elastic pre-stress on antiplane elastic wave propagation in a two-dimensional periodic structure is investigated. The medium consists of cylindrical annuli embedded on a periodic square lattice in a uniform host material. An identical inhomogeneous deformation is imposed in each annulus and the theory of small-on-large is used to find the incremental wave equation governing subsequent small-amplitude antiplane waves. The plane-wave-expansion method is employed in order to determine the permissable eigenfrequencies. It is found that pre-stress significantly affects the band gap structure for Mooney-Rivlin and Fung type materials, allowing stop bands to be switched on and off. However, it is also shown that for a specific class of materials, their phononic properties remain invariant under nonlinear deformation, permitting some rather interesting behaviour and leading to the possibility of phononic cloaks.