Absolute forbidden bands and waveguiding in two-dimensional phononic crystal plates

We introduce a supercell plane wave expansion (SC-PWE) method for the calculation of elastic band structures of two-dimensional phononic crystal plates. We compute the band structure of solid-solid and air-solid two-dimensional phononic crystal plates. The air is modeled as a low impedance medium (LIM) with very low density and very high velocities of sound. We investigate the influence of the constituent materials, of the plate thickness, and of the geometry of the array on the band structure. We establish the range of validity of the SC-PWE method in terms of the rate of convergence with respect to the number of plane waves and contrast in physical properties of the matrix and inclusion materials. We show that for high contrast solid-solid phononic crystal plates, our SC-PWE method, as other PWE-based methods introduced to date, suffers from convergence difficulties. In the case of air (modeled as the LIM) holes-solid plates, we demonstrate that the SC-PWE method leads to fast convergence for a wide range of values of solid physical properties. With these constituent materials, we find that the largest absolute forbidden bands occur in the band structure of the phononic crystal plate provided the thickness of the plate is of the order of magnitude of the periodicity of the array of inclusions. We demonstrate the existence of guided modes in an air-silicon phononic crystal plate containing a linear defect.