Quiet Structure Design Using Acoustic Black Holes

Open Access
- Author:
- Feurtado, Philip Andrew
- Graduate Program:
- Acoustics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- November 15, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Steve Conlon, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Steve Conlon, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Steve Hambric, Committee Member
John Fahnline, Committee Member
Ed Smith, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Structural Acoustics
Acoustics
Acoustic Black Holes
Damping
Vibration
Noise Control - Abstract:
- In recent years Acoustic Black Holes (ABHs) have been developed and demonstrated as effective, passive, lightweight vibration absorbers of flexural bending waves in beam and plate like structures. ABHs employ a local power-law thickness profile into a beam or plate, typically resulting in a one dimensional wedge or a two dimensional indentation in the structure. By reducing the thickness of the structure the ABH effect decreases the bending wave speed and increases the transverse vibration amplitude. In the limit where the thickness goes to zero the wave speed goes to zero and the bending waves never reach the thin edge, thus they are `absorbed.' Real, machined ABHs necessarily have some finite truncation thickness. This results in local strain concentrations that effectively dissipate energy when coupled with a high loss material such as a traditional applied damping layer. While the effectiveness of ABHs has been established and demonstrated, there is still a need to develop new insights that can help designers tailor the performance of ABHs for practical, realizable, noise and vibration control applications. This research aimed to expand the existing understanding of ABHs in ways that will be useful and instructive for designing ABH systems for practical noise and vibration control problems. One of the ultimate goals of this branch of ABH research is to be able to prescribe a specific ABH design to suit a given noise and vibration control problem. The results and methods developed here represent a significant and useful step towards that goal. The first step involved investigating the limitations and implications of analytic ABH theory, the frequency dependent performance of ABH systems, and the structural acoustic coupling of embedded ABH systems with both response to distributed pressure excitations and radiation to the fluid surrounding the structure. Analytic ABH theory provides predictions for the vibration reduction from a one dimensional ABH wedge, but the predictions conflict with key underlying assumptions such that better vibration absorption is predicted from more significant violations of the fundamental theory assumptions. It was demonstrated that these effects can be significant for practical ABH designs and contribute to the effectiveness of ABHs, particularly at low frequencies. A new design parameter was developed based on the theoretical assumptions to aid the design, assessment, and optimization of ABHs. The low frequency performance, extension, and optimization of ABHs is also of particular interest because ABHs display a `cut on frequency' above which they become effective vibration absorbers. Experimental investigations were conducted on plates with embedded arrays of ABHs as well as an individual ABH at low, mid, and high frequency in order to gain insight into the frequency dependent behavior of ABHs. The results showed that the low frequency behavior of ABH systems is dictated by the activation of low order local ABH modes within the ABH taper. Analyzing the vibration of the ABH plates in the wavenumber domain also revealed that ABH plates significantly affect the wavenumber characteristics of the structure, reducing the speed of supersonic bending waves to subsonic speeds and reducing the coupling between the structure and the surrounding fluid. Additional transmission loss measurements and computational investigations demonstrated that the wavenumber sweep from the ABH effect also can significantly affect the power injection and response of embedded ABH plates to distributed pressure excitations. Simulation results illustrated conditions for both positive and negative effects for ABH system noise control effectiveness.