Cloaking elastic waves has, in contrast to the cloaking of electromagnetic waves, remained a fundamental challenge: the latter successfully uses the invariance of Maxwell’s equations, from which the field of transformational optics has emerged, whereas the elastic Navier equations are not invariant under coordinate transformations. Our aim is to overcome this challenge, at least in practical terms, and thereby unlock applications in mechanics, ultrasound, vibration mitigation, non-destructive evaluation and elastic wave control. We achieve near-cloaking by recognizing that, despite the lack of invariance, a decoupling into a system of form invariant potential equations together with a quantifiable approximation, can be used effectively in many cases to control the flow of elastodynamic waves. Here, in particular we focus on the efficiency and practicability of the proposed near-cloaking which is illustrated using carpet cloaks to hide surface defects from incoming compressional and shear in-plane waves and from surface elastic Rayleigh waves.

与电磁波的掩盖相反，掩盖弹性波仍然是一项基本挑战：后者成功地利用了麦克斯韦方程组的不变性，从中出现了变换光学领域，而弹性纳维尔方程在坐标变换下不是不变的。我们的目标是至少在实践上克服这一挑战，从而解锁在机械，超声，减振，无损评估和弹性波控制中的应用。我们认识到，尽管缺乏不变性，但在许多情况下可以有效地使用耦合到形式不变势方程和可量化近似值的系统来控制弹性动力学波，从而实现近乎隐蔽。这里，