Metamaterials, Dams and Powerstations...

Physics arXiv - Seismic Metamaterials

In recent years, cloaking technology has taken the world of physics and engineering by storm. The possibility that any object can be hidden from incident waves has numerous applications, both practical and fantastical.

One of the more interesting is the possibility of protecting buildings from seismic waves. The idea here is to surround a building, or at least its foundations, with a metamaterial that steers seismic waves around the structure. Various groups have explored ways of doing this.

Today, however, Sang-Hoon Kim at the Mokpo National Maritime University in South Korea and Mukunda Das at The Australian National University in Canberra, suggest another idea. They point out that while seismic cloaks can protect buildings, they steer waves towards other buildings. "The cloaked seismic waves are still destructive to the buildings behind the cloaked region," they say.

Instead, they suggest that metamaterials could instead dissipate the energy in seismic waves by converting them into evanescent waves, which die down exponentially as they travel.

This would have been a good thing for Fukushima Daiichi, or any other reactors in the future...

Physics arXiv: Seismic Metamaterials Could Cloak Dams and Power Stations