Acoustic Metasurfaces for Energy Harvesting

As a kind of clean, ubiquitous and renewable form of energy, sound/noise may act as a promising sustainable power source for energy production. Due to low power densities in ordinary surroundings, sound/noise generally needs to be focused or confined through effective conversion media for better acoustic energy harvesting (AEH). Intuitively, classical Helmholtz and other chamber resonators could be used to enhance the acoustic confinement and subsequently realize AEH. The strategy based on the resonators suffers from defect of the bulky structures and uncontrolled wave field, thus hampering the applicable energy harvesting. In a different context, the recent emergence of the artificially engineered metamaterials and metasurfaces has significantly broadened the horizon of acoustic wave and wavefront manipulations. In this research, we theoretically and numerically report on innovative and practical acoustic energy harvesters based on acoustic metamaterials and metasurfaces [1, 2]. We will present our recent works on acoustic energy harvesting making use of a metamaterial and multilateral metasurfaces based on the coiling up space geometry and discuss their functionalities.
1. S. Qi, M. B. Assouar et al. APL, 108 (2016) 263501
2. S. Qi, Y. Li & M. B. Assouar. PRAppl, 7 (2017) 054006