Transformation cloaking and radial approximations for flexural waves in elastic plates

Abstract: It is known that design of elastic cloaks is much more challenging than the design idea for acoustic cloaks, cloaks of electromagnetic waves or scalar problems of anti-plane shear. In this paper, we address fully the fourth-order problem and develop a model of a broadband invisibility cloak for channelling flexural waves in thin plates around finite inclusions. We also discuss an option to employ efficiently an elastic pre-stress and body forces to achieve such a result. An asymptotic derivation provides a rigorous link between the model in question and elastic wave propagation in thin solids. This is discussed in detail to show connection with non-symmetric formulations in vector elasticity studied in earlier work.