Designing a Smart Skin with Fractal Geometry

S. Ni, C. Yang Koh, S. Kooi, and E. Thomas
Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies
Dept. of Materials Science and Eng.
MIT
Cambridge, MA
Published in 2011

Recently, the concepts of fractal geometry have been introduced into electromagnetic and plasmonic metamaterials. With their self-similarity, structures based on fractal geometry should exhibit multi-band character with high Q factors due to the scaling law. However, there exist few studies of phononic metamaterials having fractal geometry.

COMSOL is used to investigate vector elastic and scalar acoustic wave propagation in two and three dimensional systems possessing fractal geometries. The simulations of these systems, guided by our recently developed general design framework, help to further optimize the structures to reduce the loss and enhance the desired properties. Proposed structures are being fabricated via standard lithographic techniques. The wave behavior of the structures is characterized using different techniques, i.e., Brillouin light scattering, Scanning Acoustic Microscope and Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy.

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