Nonreciprocal Intelligent Soundproof Barrier with Active Nonlocal Acoustic Metastructure

Sound insulation is an important issue in daily life and has applications in various scenarios. Conventional acoustic passive metamaterial barriers are designed as a reciprocal sound insulation. However, for some specific application scenarios, unidirectional acoustic insulation is required, which is an enormous challenge for breaking the reciprocity of sound transport with conventional passive metamaterials. Here, a soundproof barrier with nonlocal acoustic metastructure is proposed, which consists of a microcontroller to connect a pair of spatially separated microphones and speakers, to tailoring the acoustic wave transmission for realizing nonreciprocal acoustic insulation. The theoretical calculation and experiment measurement indicated that the active acoustic barrier with a selectable working frequency can realize the suppressive effect in one direction and the enhancive effect in the other direction for an incident acoustic signal. Particularly, the function of an active soundproof barrier can be freely switched to forward, backward, and bidirectional sound insulation by tailoring the nonlocal distance of the digital meta‐atom. Furthermore, this acoustic metastructure is extended from a one‐dimentional waveguide to a two‐dimentional plane to illustrate that it is still valid in an open‐field environment. The proposed customizable nonreciprocal soundproof barriers provide an avenue for many applications in the specific scenarios that require unidirectional sound insulation and high air permeability.