Acoustic metamaterials: A review on design architectures, additive manufacturing techniques, AI-driven enhancements, and emerging applications

Engineered materials known as metamaterials allow for the control of electromagnetic and acoustic waves because their structural design determines their properties rather than their composition. Comprising subwavelength periodic structures, Acoustic Metamaterials (AMMs) display unusual characteristics like bulk modulus and negative effective density. These characteristics provide sophisticated applications in sound insulation, wave focusing, acoustic cloaking, and imaging. This study summarizes recent developments in AMM research, with a focus on innovative structural designs that go beyond traditional methods to accomplish effective sound reduction and wave manipulation. Notwithstanding advancements, significant obstacles still exist, especially in obtaining broadband functionality and scaling designs for realistic implementation. An important aspect of AMM development is fabrication. With its accuracy and capacity to create intricate structures, additive manufacturing has opened up new possibilities while conventional manufacturing still provides dependability. AMM applications are now available in a wider range of fields, such as noise reduction, underwater acoustics, and medical imaging. Future directions emphasize how AMM design and artificial intelligence (AI) can be integrated. By combining physics-based and data-driven insights, machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques can remove design restrictions, maximize performance, and speed up discovery. In general, the combination of materials science, acoustics, and AI makes AMMs a revolutionary platform for next-generation acoustic technologies that tackle issues with wave manipulation and noise reduction.