Underwater acoustic multiplexing communication by pentamode metasurface

Abstract

As the dominant information carrier in water, the acoustic wave is widely used for underwater detection, communication and imaging. Even though underwater acoustic communication has been greatly improved in the past decades, it still suffers from slow transmission speeds and low information capacity. The recently developed acoustic orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing communication promises a high efficiency, large capacity and fast transmission speed for acoustic communication. However, the current works on OAM multiplexing communication mainly appear in airborne acoustics. The application of acoustic OAM for underwater communication remains to be further explored and studied. In this paper, an impedance matching pentamode demultiplexing metasurface is designed to realize multiplexing and demultiplexing in underwater acoustic communication. The impedance matching of the metasurface ensures high transmission of the transmitted information. The information encoded into two different OAM beams as two independent channels is numerically demonstrated by realizing real-time picture transfer. The simulation shows the effectiveness of the system for underwater acoustic multiplexing communication. This work paves the way for experimental demonstration and practical application of OAM multiplexing for underwater acoustic communication.