Enhancement of the Sound Transmission Loss of Poroelastic Linings

It has been noted that the low frequency absorption coefficient of a porous sample placed in a standing wave tube is affected by the nature of the sample’s edge constraint. The edge constraint has the effect of stiffening the solid phase of the sample, which itself can be strongly coupled to the material’s fluid phase, and hence the incident sound field, by viscous means at low frequencies. In recent work it has also been shown that such a circumferential constraint causes the low frequency transmission loss of a layer of fibrous material to approach a finite low frequency limit that is proportional to the flow resistance of the layer and which is substantially higher than that of an unconstrained sample of the same material. However, it was also found that the benefit of the circumferential edge constraint was reduced in a transitional frequency range by a shearing resonance of the sample. Here it will be shown that the effect of that resonance can be mitigated or eliminated by adding additional axial and radial constraints running through the sample. It will also be shown that the constraint effect can be modeled closely by using a finite element procedure based on the Biot poroelastic theory. Implications for low frequency barrier design are also discussed