The field of Acoustic Metamaterials (AMMs) has long been established, but has recently garnered significant interest, with rapid advances being made. However, most research is centered around noise control, with other applications, such as sound detection receiving less attention. One particularly interesting application is the use of AMMS for directional sound detection, where some promising work has recently been published. This is still a largely unexplored field, with various possible avenues of approach. While long-standing solutions to directional sound detection and source localization exist, they present drawbacks. Notably, they often rely on multiple transducers positioned around a space to capture information. In such solutions, the microphones lack intrinsic directionality; instead, directional information is inferred by algorithms. This leads to bigger systems which demand complex computation. This research investigates the design principles behind existing and novel AMM designs for directional sound detection, aiming to expand the current sphere of possibilities in the field. The results of physics simulations are presented, verifying the theoretical validity of the designs. Real-world results will also be presented, providing acoustic characterization of 3-D-printed prototypes of the new designs. These results reveal that the designs’ properties can be transferred to practical conditions.
Gavrielides et al. (Wed,) studied this question.