RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Bioinspired metagel with broadband tunable impedance matching
JF Science Advances
JO Sci Adv
FD American Association for the Advancement of Science
SP eabb3641
DO 10.1126/sciadv.abb3641
VO 6
IS 44
A1 Dong, Erqian
A1 Song, Zhongchang
A1 Zhang, Yu
A1 Ghaffari Mosanenzadeh, Shahrzad
A1 He, Qi
A1 Zhao, Xuanhe
A1 Fang, Nicholas X.
YR 2020
UL http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabb3641.abstract
AB To maximize energy transmission from a source through a media, the concept of impedance matching has been established in electrical, acoustic, and optical engineering. However, existing design of acoustic impedance matching, which extends exactly by a quarter wavelength, sets a fundamental limit of narrowband transmission. Here, we report a previously unknown class of bioinspired metagel impedance transformers to overcome this limit. The transformer embeds a two-dimensional metamaterial matrix of steel cylinders into hydrogel. Using experimental data of the biosonar from the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin, we demonstrate through theoretical analysis that broadband transmission is achieved when the bioinspired acoustic impedance function is introduced. Furthermore, we experimentally show that the metagel device offers efficient implementation in broadband underwater ultrasound detection with the benefit of being soft and tunable. The bioinspired two-dimensional metagel breaks the length-wavelength dependence, which paves a previously unexplored way for designing next-generation broadband impedance matching devices in diverse wave engineering.