Acoustic bands are studied numerically for a Lamb wave propagating in an anti-symmetric structure of a one- dimensional periodic plate by using the method of supercell plane-wave expansion. The results show that all the bands are pinned in pairs at the Brillouin zone boundary as long as the anti-symmetry remains and acoustic band gaps (ABGs) only appear between certain bands. In order to reveal the relationship between the band pinning and the anti-symmetry, the method of eigenmode analysis is introduced to calculate the displacement fields of different plate structures. Further, the method of harmony response analysis is employed to calculate the reference spectra to verify the accuracy of numerical calculations of acoustic band map, and both the locations and widths of ABGs in the acoustic band map are in good agreement with those of the reference spectra. The investigations show that the pinning effect is very sensitive to the anti-symmetry of periodic plates, and by introducing different types of breakages, more ABGs or narrow pass bands will appear, which is meaningful in band gap engineering.
The super-cell plane wave expansion method is employed to calculate band structures for the design of a siliconbased one-dimensional phononic crystal plate with large absolute forbidden bands. In this method, a low impedance medium is introduced to replace the free stress boundary, which largely reduces the computational complexity. The dependence of band gaps on structural parameters is investigated in detail. To prove the validity of the super-cell plane wave expansion, the transmitted power spectra of the Lamb wave are calculated by using a finite element method. With the detailed computation, the band-gap of a one-dimensional plate can be designed as required with appropriate structural parameters, which provides a guide to the fabrication of a Lamb wave phononic crystal.