Sound Transmission Properties of a Porous Meta-Material with Periodically Embedded Helmholtz Resonators

The main scope of this work is to study the effect of embedding a periodic pattern inside a porous material, in order to passively improving its acoustic performance in terms of sound transmission loss. A contemplated application is the improvement of classical aeronautical soundproofing packages. In order to reach this goal, numerical models of an acoustic package including periodic patterns are implemented using the finite element method and the Transfer Matrix Method. Firstly, some of the proposed configurations are experimentally tested, providing a comparison and validation of the obtained numerical results. Afterwards, several configurations of inclusions are numerically studied, and incorporate hollow cylindrical inclusions, half-cut hollow cylindrical inclusions and cylindrical Helmholtz resonators. The improvements in terms of transmission loss, essentially brought by a periodicity peak, are evaluated under plane wave excitation with various incidence angles. The main novelties of the present work are represented by an experimental validation of the proposed acoustic meta-materials that were only numerically studied in previous works. The effect of the inclusion of a periodic pattern of Helmholtz resonators inside the foam core is also considered. The presented numerical results are also evaluated for different incidence angles of an exciting acoustic plane wave.