Phys.org September 7, 2022
Airy beams are a class of acoustic waves that move on a curved, arch-like trajectory and can auto-focus around obstacles that are directly in the beam’s path, which makes them well suited for ultrasound applications in biomedical imaging, therapy, non-destructive testing, and particle manipulation. A team of researchers in the US (Washington State University, Pennsylvania State University) has designed and fabricated a family of Airy-beam-enabled binary acoustic metasurfaces (AB BAMs) to generate Airy beams for underwater ultrasound-beam manipulation. They used 3D printing with two coding bits: a polylactic acid unit acting as a bit “1” and a water unit acting as a bit “0” coupled with a planar single-element ultrasound transducer for experimental validation. They demonstrated the capability of AB BAMs in flexibly tuning the focal region size and beam focusing in 3D space. According to the researchers 3D-printed AB BAMs are simple to design, easy to fabricate, and low cost to produce with the capabilities to achieve tunable focal size, flexible 3D beam focusing, arbitrary multipoint focusing, and continuous steerability, which creates unprecedented potential for ultrasound-beam manipulation…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
…3D printed flexible and versatile tool known as Airy beam-enabled binary acoustic metasurfaces (AB-BAMs) for ultrasound beam manipulation… Credit: Phys. Rev. Applied 18, 024070, 26 August 2022