ACOUSTIC PERFORMANCE OF REITERATED HIERARCHICAL HONEYCOMB STRUCTURES

Sandwich panels constructed from honeycomb structures have been found to reduce sound transmission and improve vibration isolation. In this work, reiterated hierarchical honeycomb structures have been modeled for the core in sandwich panels and studied for sound transmission properties using finite element analysis. Several honeycomb unit cell geometries are considered, including, regular hexagonal, auxetic with properties of negative Poisson’s ratio, and different reiterated hierarchical structures. Previous studies have shown that auxetic honeycomb structures exhibit improved sound transmission loss compared to regular honeycomb sandwich panels. Two different orientations of the honeycomb unit cell geometry have been studied, namely, the zigzag and armchair configurations, which are, rotated 90 degrees. Both regular and auxetic honeycombs have been used in both these configurations. The finite element model of the panels are used to extract natural frequencies and mode shapes and to perform steady state frequency response dynamic analysis up to 1000 Hz. The transmitted sound pressure levels on the surface of each structure is extracted and compared to study the influence of the reiterated hierarchy on sound transmission characteristics. The influence of corner reinforcement constructed by subtracting interior high-level hierarchical structure except at the vertices of the underlying lower-level honeycomb unit cell was also studied. Furthermore, a study was conducted to quantify the effect of changing the ratio of cell-wall thickness between various levels of hierarchy. Special focus on the limiting case of level-1 hierarchy with zero level-0 thickness is also studied. In all cases, the total mass was kept constant in order to isolate only stiffness and mass distribution effects. The results show that introduction of reiterated hierarchy in level-1 structures reduced the sound transmission of honeycomb sandwich panels compared to parent level-0 geometry. Results also showed that the corner reinforcement does not influence the sound transmission characteristics significantly, but does change the stiffness of the structure. For regular hexagonal honeycombs, changing the ratio of thickness between various levels of hierarchy did not affect the sound transmission significantly but made the structure stiffer when the ratio was increased, and reduced the stiffness when the ratio was decreased. For auxetic honeycomb structure, increasing the ratio made the structure less stiff, but reducing the ratio did not change the stiffness significantly