Sound Transmission Loss Maximization of Multi-panel Structures Lined with Poroelastic Materials by Topology Optimization

전달손실 최대화를 위한 흡음재-패널 배열 최적설계

Though multi-panel structures lined with a poroelastic material have been widely used to reduce sound transmission in various fields, most of the previous works to design them were conducted by repeated analyses or experiments based on initially given configurations or sequences. Therefore, it was difficult to obtain the optimal sequence of multi-panel structures lined with a poroelastic material yielding superior sound isolation capability. In this work, we propose a new design method to sequence a multi-panel structure lined with a poroelastic material having maximized sound transmission loss. Being formulated as a one-dimensional topology optimization problem for a given target frequency, the optimal sequencing of panel-poroelastic layers is systematically carried out in an iterative manner. In this method, a panel layer is expressed as a limiting case of a poroelastic layer to facilitate the optimization process. This means that main material properties of a poroelastic material are treated as Interpolated functions of design variables. The designed sequences of panel-poroelastic layers were shown to be significantly affected by the target frequencies; more panel layers were used at higher target frequencies. The sound transmission loss of the system was calculated by the transfer matrix derived from Biot's theory.