Optimal synthesis of tunable elastic wave-guides

Topology optimization, or control in the coefficients of partial differential equations, has been successfully utilized for designing wave-guides with precisely tailored functionalities. For many applications it would be desirable to have the possibility of drastically altering the wave-guiding properties of a device “on the fly,” in a controllable manner as an influence of some external input.

This would enable wave-guides with highly non-linear input–output mappings, such as for example controllable wave switches. In this paper, we propose using finite elastic pre-straining for the purpose of tuning a wave-guide. In order to systematically formulate and solve the wave-guide synthesis problems we utilize mathematical programming methods in conjunction with topology optimization for parametrizing the design space.

The resulting extremal problem is, from a practical point, equivalent to finding an optimal subdivision of a given control volume into two disjoint subsets occupied by two different materials, normally resulting in a highly heterogeneous elastic body with desired wave-guiding functionalities in the original and finitely deformed configurations.

The proposed methodology is illustrated with numerical examples.