Analysis of underwater decoupling properties of a locally resonant acoustic metamaterial coating

This paper presents a semi-analytical solution for the vibration and sound radiation of a semi-infinite plate covered by a decoupling layer consisting of locally resonant acoustic metamaterial. Formulations are derived based on a combination use of effective medium theory and the theory of elasticity for the decoupling material. Theoretical results show good agreements between the method developed in this paper and the conventional finite element method (FEM), but the method of this paper is more efficient than FEM. Numerical results also show that system with acoustic metamaterial decoupling layer exhibits significant noise reduction performance at the local resonance frequency of the acoustic metamaterial, and such performance can be ascribed to the vibration suppression of the base plate. It is demonstrated that the effective density of acoustic metamaterial decoupling layer has a great influence on the mechanical impedance of the system. Furthermore, the resonance frequency of locally resonant structure can be effectively predicted by a simple model, and it can be significantly affected by the material properties of the locally resonant structure.