A Basic Study on the Design of Dotted-Art Heterogeneous MPP Sound Absorbers

Abstract

Recently, dotted-art MPPs have been proposed in which a designed pattern is made with the holes. In such a case, the MPP becomes heterogeneous in general. However, existing theories used for the prediction of the absorption characteristics of MPPs assume homogeneity. Therefore, the elaboration of a method for heterogeneous MPPs needs to be performed. In previous work, the authors proposed a method to predict the absorption characteristics of a heterogeneous MPP by using synthesized impedances of each part with different parameters; this is called the synthetic impedance method (SIM) in the present paper. The SIM can potentially be used for various heterogeneous MPPs; however, its scope of applicability needs to be clarified. Furthermore, in proposing a design concept of dotted-art heterogeneous MPPs, the condition that would make the designed MPPs fall within the scope of the SIM needs to be determined. Therefore, in this study, in order to clarify the scope of the applicability of the SIM, twelve samples are first prepared, and then measured sound absorption characteristics and predicted ones are compared and examined in terms of prediction errors. The results show that there are two conditions that should be met to produce predictable heterogeneous MPPs: (1) holes are distributed over the entire surface of the specimen, and (2) the hole spacing is constant. Considering these conditions, a design concept for a dotted-art heterogeneous MPP is proposed: two types of holes, larger holes for the pattern and smaller holes for the background, should be used to meet the above two conditions. Case studies with nine prototypes show that the SIM can make predictions for dotted-art heterogeneous MPPs fabricated according to the concept described above.

Keywords

• microperforated panel (MPP)
• heterogeneous MPP
• dotted-art heterogeneous MPP
• synthetic impedance method
• sound absorption