Active Willis metamaterials with programmable density and stiffness

Abstract

Investigation and implementation of Active Willis Metamaterials (AWM) have been done exclusively, in all the available literature, by approaches that do not rely on any solid control theory basis. When coupled with piezoelectric control elements, the available approaches have not included, from the first principles, the exact form of the constitutive relationship of the piezoelectric materials. Furthermore, in all these approaches, stability analysis, robustness, ability to accommodate uncertainty or parameter changes, or consideration of disturbance rejection has not been addressed at all. More importantly, the available formulations have always mixed the flow and effort variables of the AWM, resulting in a form that is totally incompatible for the use in generating, investigating, or even designing any appropriate sensing or control applications of the material. In this paper, the piezoelectric-based AWM is modeled, from the first principles, to develop a constitutive coupling form that enables its use in actuation, sensing, and as an integrated controller that can be analyzed, designed, and optimized using the classical, optimal, and robust control system theories. Lagrange dynamics formulation is used to generate the equations governing the Willis coupling, the piezoelectric coupling, as well as the active robust controller. With this developed controlled-based structure of the AWM, the inherent and powerful capabilities of the AWM that lie in its ability to robustly control the material properties themselves such as the compliance (or stiffness) and specific volume (or density) are demonstrated in great detail via several numerical examples. Controlling these properties enables the AWM to be used in numerous important and imaginative applications such as cloaking, beam shifting, beam focusing, as well as many other applications that are limited only by our imagination.