We proposed a reconfigurable valley topological acoustic waveguide constructed using a 2D phononic crystal (PnC) with C3v symmetric arrangement of three rods in the unit cell. An interface between two types of PnCs with differently oriented unit cells exhibits high robustness of the valley transport of acoustic waves via the topologically protected state. Structural reconfiguration was introduced by the continuous translation of rod arrays in the PnCs. The topological phase transition in this translational change was quantitatively identified by the change in the Berry curvature. The translation of the rods leaves a dimer array at the interface, creating a localized/defective mode along the waveguide. Despite the presence of the localized mode, the acoustic wave can propagate along the reconfigurable waveguide the same as the original waveguide. The continuous translation of a rod array can be used to turn on and off the bandgap. This can be a new approach to design a robust acoustic device with a high reconfigurability.

Based on the concept of band topology in phonon dispersion, we designed a topological phononic crystal in a thin plate for developing an efficient elastic waveguide. Despite that various topological phononic structures have been actively proposed, a quantitative design strategy of the phononic band and its robustness assessment in an elastic regime are still missing, hampering the realization of topological acoustic devices. We adopted a snowflake-like structure for the crystal unit cell and determined the optimal structure that exhibited the topological phase transition of the planar phononic crystal by changing the unit cell structure. The bandgap width could be adjusted by varying the length of the snow-side branch, and a topological phase transition occurred in the unit cell structure with threefold rotational symmetry. Elastic waveguides based on edge modes appearing at interfaces between crystals with different band topologies were designed, and their transmission efficiencies were evaluated numerically and experimentally. The results demonstrate the robustness of the elastic wave propagation in thin plates. Moreover, we experimentally estimated the backscattering length, which measures the robustness of the topologically protected propagating states against structural inhomogeneities. The results quantitatively indicated that degradation of the immunization against the backscattering occurs predominantly at the corners in the waveguides, indicating that the edge mode observed is a relatively weak topological state.