Mechanical Cloaking of Halftoned Imagery

摘要

Cloaking objects with metamaterials has been extensively studied to hide internal objects across various physical properties, including optical, acoustic, and thermal. We explore a new direction in mechanical cloaking: halftoning an image using a porous structure that behaves like a uniform, linear, isotropic material and visually matches a target image. For an external observer, this creates the surprising effect where the object appears mechanically isotropic and homogeneous while its porous structure resembles a target image. We introduce a parametric class of porous structures suitable for this problem, as demonstrated by numerical experiments. The structures we define offer a wide range of visual contrasts, enabling effective halftoning while maintaining near isotropic effective mechanical properties.