Cochlear bionic acoustic metamaterials

Abstract

A design of bionic acoustic metamaterial and acoustic functional devices was proposed by employing the mammalian cochlear as a prototype. First, combined with the experimental data in previous literatures, it is pointed out that the cochlear hair cells and stereocilia cluster are a kind of natural biological acoustic metamaterials with the negative stiffness characteristics. Then, to design the acoustic functional devices conveniently in engineering application, a simplified parametric helical structure was proposed to replace actual irregular cochlea for bionic design, and based on the computational results of such a bionic parametric helical structure, it is suggested that the overall cochlear is a local resonant system with the negative dynamic effective mass characteristics. There are many potential applications in the bandboard energy recovery device, cochlear implant, and acoustic black hole.