Soft Phononic Crystals with Deformation-Independent Band Gaps

Soft phononic crystals have the advantages over their stiff counterparts of being flexible and reconfigurable. Normally, the band gaps of soft phononic crystals will be modified after deformation due to both geometric and constitutive nonlinearity. Indeed these are important properties that can be exploited to tune the dynamic properties of the material. However, in some instances, it may be that one wishes to deform the medium while retaining the band gap structure. A special class of soft phononic crystals is described here with band gaps that are independent or almost-independent of the imposed mechanical deformation, which enables the design of phononic crystals with robust performance. This remarkable behaviour originates from transformation elasticity theory, which leaves the wave equation and the eigenfrequencies invariant after deformation. The necessary condition to achieve such a property is that the Lagrangian elasticity tensor of the hyperelastic material should be constant, i.e. independent of deformation. It is demonstrated that incompressible neo-Hookean materials exhibit such a unique property. Semilinear materials also possess this property under special loading conditions. Phononic crystals composed of these two materials are studied theoretically and the predictions of invariance, or the manner in which the response deviates from invariance, are confirmed via numerical simulation.