Professor Parnell to give plenary talk at IMECE

Professor William Parnell has been selected as a plenary speaker at the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE), which takes place in Utah, US, this coming November.

IMECE is the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' (ASME) largest research and development conference focussed primarily on mechanical engineering. It encompasses perspectives from many engineering disciplines.

Prof Parnell will present a talk on acoustics, vibrations and phononics entitled ‘Hyperelastic metamaterials and phononic medis - stretching the truth?'. A compelling focus of the talk will be the mathematical theory that underpins the design of both acoustic and elastodynamic metamaterials and phononic media, based on transformation theory.

Using acoustics as a context, Prof Parnell will describe a new microstructure that consists of an array of rigid rods closely impedance matched to air. As a result, it can slow down sound in air, making it useful in a number of configurations. For example, it can be employed to halve the resonant frequency of the standard quarter-wavelength resonator, or can halve the size of the resonator for a specified resonant frequency.