A magnetostrictive patch transducer (MPT) is a transducer that exploits the magnetostrictive phenomena representing interactions between mechanical and magnetic fields in ferromagnetic materials. Since MPT technology was mainly developed and applied for nondestructive ultrasonic testing in waveguides such as pipes and plates, this paper will accordingly review advances of this technology in such a context. An MPT consists of a magnetic circuit composed of permanent magnets and coils, and a thin magnetostrictive patch that works as a sensing and actuating element which is bonded onto or coupled with a test waveguide. The configurations of the circuit and magnetostrictive patch therefore critically affect the performance of an MPT as well as the excited and measured wave modes in a waveguide. In this paper, a variety of state-of-the-art MPT configurations and their applications will be reviewed along with the working principle of this transducer type. The use of MPTs in wave experiments involving phononic crystals and elastic metamaterials is also briefly introduced.

We discovered a new transmodal Fabry-Pérot resonance where one elastic-wave mode is maximally transmitted to another. It occurs when the phase difference of two dissimilar modes through an anisotropic layer becomes odd multiples of $\pi$ under the reflection-free and weak mode-coupling assumptions. Unlike the well-established Fabry-Pérot resonance, the transmodal resonance must involve two coupled elastic waves between longitudinal and shear modes. The investigation into the origin of wiggly transmodal transmission spectra suggests that efficient broadband mode conversion can be achieved if the media satisfy the structural stability condition to some degree. The new resonance mechanism, also experimentally characterized, opens up new possibilities for manipulating elastic wave modes as an effective alternative to generating shear-mode ultrasound.

In this paper, we present the first realization of an elastic metamaterial allowing independent tuning of negative density and stiffness for elastic waves propagating along a designated direction. In electromagnetic (or acoustic) metamaterials, it is now possible to tune permittivity (bulk modulus) and permeability (density) independently. Apparently, the tuning methods seem to be directly applicable for elastic case, but no realization has yet been made due to the unique tensorial physics of elasticity that makes wave motions coupled in a peculiar way. To realize independent tunability, we developed a single-phased elastic metamaterial supported by theoretical analysis and numerical/experimental validations.

The sound absorption of a porous layer is affected by its thickness, especially in a low-frequency range. If a hard-backed porous layer contains periodical arrangements of rigid partitions that are coordinated parallel and perpendicular to the direction of incoming sound waves, the lower bound of the effective sound absorption can be lowered much more and the overall absorption performance enhanced. The consequence of rigid partitioning in a porous layer is to make the first thickness resonance mode in the layer appear at much lower frequencies compared to that in the original homogeneous porous layer with the same thickness. Moreover, appropriate partitioning yields multiple thickness resonances with higher absorption peaks through impedance matching. The physics of the partitioned porous layer, or the metaporous layer, is theoretically investigated in this study.