Hiding a submarine? It’s not sci‑fi it’s clever materials science.

Big vessels are noisy. Engines, propellers and machinery make low‑frequency sound that travels for miles, and active sonar throws back huge echoes. So how do you make something the size of a ship acoustically “smaller”? Nicole Kessissoglou, Alexei Skvortsov, Gyani Sharma, Ian MacGillivray and Karthik Modur explain a practical route: resonant acoustic coatings that tame both outgoing noise and incoming sonar pings.

A cloak sounds magical, and researchers have explored acoustic cloaks that steer sound around an object. The problem? Real cloaks need extreme, fragile properties (think infinite density at the surface) or microscale “pentamode” lattices that fall apart under real ocean conditions. Not very naval‑friendly.

Enter acoustic coatings — soft, rubbery tiles with carefully placed inclusions: air cavities or hard particles. The magic is resonance. Cavities “breathe” (monopole resonance) and particles rock back and forth (dipole resonance). Near those resonances the coating scatters incoming sound into shear motion inside the material, and that shear gets damped quickly. The result: much less reflection back to sonar and more internal absorption. In short, you turn pesky sound into heat inside the coating.

Why this matters practically: modern coatings can survive deep ocean pressure and rough conditions and are far more effective than the early WWII “Alberich” rubber tiles. Today’s designs are engineered, tunable, and aimed at real naval challenges: suppressing outgoing noise to reduce passive detection and cutting reflections to frustrate active sonar.

If you like who did the work — Nicole Kessissoglou, Alexei T. Skvortsov, Gyani Shankar Sharma, Ian R. MacGillivray and Karthik Modur — they’re a mix of university and defence science teams bringing theory, simulation and experiments together. Their paper is a neat example of turning deep acoustic theory into practical, resilient materials that solve a very noisy problem.