Abstracts Category : Other

An Effective Methodology for Suppressing Structure-Borne Sound Radiation

by Lingguang Chen

This dissertation is primarily concerned with the development of an effective methodology for reducing structure-borne sound radiation from an arbitrarily shaped vibrating structure. There are three major aspects that separate the present methodology from all the previous ones. Firstly, it is a non-contact and non-invasive approach, which is applicable to a class of vibrating structures encountered in engineering applications. Secondly, the input data consists of a combined normal surface velocity distribution on a portion of a vibrating surface and the radiated acoustic pressure at a few field points. The normal surface velocities are measured by using a laser vibrometer over a portion of the structural surface accessible to a laser beam, while the field acoustic pressures are measured by a small array of microphones. The normal surface velocities over the rest surface of the vibrating structure are reconstructed by using the Helmholtz Equation Least Squares (HELS) method. Finally, the acoustic pressures are correlated to structural vibration by decomposing the normal surface velocity into the forced-vibro-acoustic components (F-VAC). These F-VACs are mutually orthogonal basis functions that can uniquely describe the normal surface velocity. The weightings of these F-VACs represent the relative contributions of structural vibrations into the sound radiation. This makes it possible to suppress structure-borne acoustic radiation in the most cost-effective manner simply by controlling the key F-VACs of a vibrating structure. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology for reducing structure-borne acoustic radiation is examined numerically and experimentally, and compared with those via traditional experimental modal analyses. Results have demonstrated that the proposed methodology enables one to reduce much more acoustic radiation at any selected target frequencies than the traditional approach.