Experimental evidence of auxetic features in seismic metamaterials: Ellipticity of seismic Rayleigh waves for subsurface architectured ground with holes

Structured soils with regular meshes of metric size holes implemented in first ten meters of the ground have been theoretically and experimentally tested under seismic disturbance this last decade. Structured soils with rigid inclusions embedded in a substratum have been also recently developed. The influence of these inclusions in the ground can be characterized in different ways: redistribution of energy within the network with focusing effects for seismic metamaterials, wave reflection, frequency filtering, reduction of the amplitude of seismic signal energy, etc. Here we first provide some time-domain analysis of the flat lens effect in conjunction with some form of external cloaking of Rayleigh waves and then we experimentally show the effect of a finite mesh of cylindrical holes on the ellipticity of the surface Rayleigh waves at the level of the Earth's surface. Orbital diagrams in time domain are drawn for the surface particle's velocity in vertical (x,z) and horizontal (x,y) planes. These results enable us to observe that the mesh of holes locally creates a tilt of the axes of the ellipse and changes the direction of particle movement. Interestingly, changes of Rayleigh waves ellipticity can be interpreted as changes of an effective Poisson ratio. However, the proximity of the source is also important to explain the shape of the ellipses. We analyze these observations in terms of wave mode conversions inside the mesh and we propose to broaden the discussion on the complexity of seismic wave phenomena in structured soils such as soils foundations and on the coupling effects specific to the soil-structure interaction.