Plane harmonic wave propagation in three-dimensional composite media

An important characteristic of waves propagating through periodic materials is the existence of stop bands. A stop band implies the range of frequencies over which a medium completely reflects all incident waves and there is no transmission. Predicting stop band phenomena in periodic materials is regarded as the first step toward designing composite microstructures capable of propagating energy in a predetermined manner. In this paper a global-local modeling methodology previously proposed by the authors is used to successively predict stop bands in three-dimensional composite media. Numerical results reveal that the first stop band of the considered microstructures occurs where an acoustic shear mode veers with the lowest optical branch of the same symmetry class. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.