Topology Optimization Studies for Light Weight Acoustic Panels

With the growing need to reduce green house gas emissions, increasing flight effciency has been a primary challenge faced by the aviation industry. Designing lighter and more effcient aircraft is becoming a goal shared throughout the global air transportation industry. A light weight acoustic panel is desired to replace heavy and bulky foam panels inside the fuselage for cabin noise control. Currently, there is no consensus on the best panel design. Therefore, this thesis will explore using topology optimization to suggest new panel designs. This thesis contains studies of some acoustic panel designs as well as methodologies used to optimize the core topology of a sandwich panel with a maximized band gap while remaining light and stiff. In this thesis, the sound transmission loss has been related to the existence of band gap, and a band gap is being maximized as a surrogate for sound transmission loss. The main results obtained from this thesis show interesting topologies with a band gap around 300 Hz being maximized under mass and stiffness constraints, and the core topologies have been found to have resemblance to resonators.M.A.S