• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.18 no.12
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• pp.1262-1269
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• 2008

Though multilayered foam-panel structures 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 an optimal sequence of multilayered foam-panel structure 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 fur 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 variable. The designed sequences of panel-poroelastic multilayer were shown to be significantly affected by the target frequencies; more panels were obtained at higher target frequency. The sound transmission loss of the system was calculated by the transfer matrix derived from Biot's theory.