Optimal Elastostatic Cloaks

An elastic cloak hides a hole (or an inhomogeneity) from elastic fields. In this paper, a formulation of the optimal design of elastic cloaks based on the adjoint state method, in which the balance of linear momentum is enforced as a constraint, is presented. The design parameters are the elastic moduli of the cloak, and the objective function is a measure of the distance between the solutions in the physical and in the virtual bodies. Both the elastic medium and the cloak are assumed to be made of isotropic linear elastic materials. However, the proposed formulation can easily be extended to anisotropic solids. In order to guarantee smooth inhomogeneous elastic moduli within the cloak a penalization term is added to the objective function. Mixed finite elements are used for discretizing the weak formulation of the optimization problem. Several numerical examples of optimal elastic cloaks designed for both single and multiple loads are presented. We consider different geometries and loading types and observe that in some cases the optimal elastic cloaks for cloaking holes (cavities) are made of auxetic materials.