Compact phase-modulated metasurface for vibration encoding and localization by single-sensor

Sensing and locating multi-source vibrations has been an attractive theme in various fields. The conventional methods of vibration localization rely on numerous sensors and complicated hardware. Aiming at such flaw, in this paper, a coding metasurface based on wavefront phase random modulation is designed. The designed metasurface can encode the vibration response in a direction-dependent manner through a disordered coupling network to realize highly uncorrelated vibration transmission. Combining the designed coding metasurface with the computational sensing technology, a metasurface-based single-sensor vibration sensing system (MSVS) is proposed. Deploying this metasurface sensing system, multi-source vibrations can be located and identified using only one sensor. A series of random, multiple vibration excitation tests with high-precision verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed MSVS. Compared with the bulky coding metamaterials with negative index, the proposed coding metasurface has the absolute advantages of single-material, simple-paradigm and easy-fabrication, which is more conducive to practical application. The proposed metasurface sensing system paves a promising avenue to simplify the vibration sensing system, which shows potential applications in various fields, such as structural health monitoring, fault diagnosis and intelligent devices.