Water-air acoustic communication based on broadband impedance matching

Efficient acoustic communication across the water-air interface has always been expected in the field of ocean exploration. However, the existing research works are mainly concentrated on the narrow-band transmission based on resonance, which greatly limits the transmission capacity and efficiency. Here, we combined air-based and water-based metafluids to realize an exponential gradient impedance matching layer for broadband water-air sound transmission. By cooperatively adjusting the sound velocity and thickness in the matching layers, we modulated the required acoustic parameters of each layer into a reasonable range, which can be conveniently achieved by the proposed metafluids. A matching layer sample was constructed and validated in a water tank. Experimental results show that the proposed matching layer can achieve an average sound energy transmission enhancement above 16.7 dB from 880 to 1760 Hz across the water-air interface. A water-air acoustic communication scene was further experimentally demonstrated through transmitting a multicolor picture from air to water, which shows extremely high communication capacity and accuracy. Our work is promising for more applications based on water-air transmission and opens an avenue to the design and implementation of the extreme impedance matching case.