Broadband sound pressure enhancement in passive metafluids

Acoustic sensors operating in lossy environments, such as water, require significant sensitivity to overcome the sound attenuation in the environment and thus see farther. We show here that a surprisingly large class of passive fluids has the ability to enhance the sound pressure propagating inside them without employing active actuation. Specifically, the general requirements for this remarkable property are fluid impedance higher than the impedance of the environment and negligible insertion loss as sound propagates from the environment into the high impedance fluid. We demonstrate the pressure enhancing effect by designing a broadband isotropic metafluid that increases the pressure of sound waves impinging from water. We validate the design in numerical simulations showing that significant sound pressure level increases are achievable in realistic metafluid structures in large bandwidths covering several octaves. Our approach opens up unexplored avenues towards improving acoustic transducer sensitivity, which is critical in applications, such as medical ultrasound imaging, sonar, and acoustic communications.