An integral equation approach to acoustic cloaking

Abstract

The paper presents an original boundary integral equation (BIE) formulation for the analysis of the acoustic cloaking of a scatterer. The advantage of such an approach is the lower computational burden, especially when the analysis of a large portion of the hosting domain is required. The partial differential equation governing the propagation inside the cloak is recast in the form of non-homogeneous wave equation, with field sources depending on the mechanical properties of the cloak. The boundary integral formulation is derived using the standard procedure. The boundary element method (BEM) is used to derive the matrix transfer function of the cloak. The latter is applied to the incident field at the cloak's outer boundary to obtain the total field at arbitrary locations in the host. The formulation is applied to the simple case of a radially symmetric cloak embedding a circular obstacle. Numerical results are presented for sound-hard and sound-soft obstacles, including a study of the cloaking efficiency as a function of the frequency.