Prediction of Sound Radiation from Submerged Cylindrical Shell Based on Dominant Modes

A sound radiation calculation method by using dominant modes is proposed to predict the sound radiation from a cylindrical shell. This method can provide an effective way to quickly predict the sound radiation of the structure by using as few displacement monitoring points as possible on the structure surface. In this paper, modal analyses of a submerged cylindrical shell are carried out by taking the vibration mode of a cylindrical shell in a vacuum, as a set of orthogonal bases. The modal sound radiation efficiency and modal contributions to sound radiation power are presented, and comparison results show that a few modes dominantly contribute to the sound radiation power at low frequencies. These modes, called dominantly radiated structural modes in this paper, are applied to predict the sound radiation power of submerged cylindrical shells by obtaining the modal participant coefficients and sound radiation efficiency of these dominant modes. Aside from the orthogonal decomposition method, a method of solving displacement modal superposition equations is proposed to extract the modal participant coefficients, because few modes contribute to the vibration displacement near the resonant frequencies. Some simulations of cylindrical shells with different boundaries are conducted, and the number of measuring points required are examined. Results show that this method, based on dominant modes, can well predict the low-frequency sound radiation power of submerged cylindrical shells. In addition, compared with the boundary element method, this method can better reduce the number of required measuring points significantly. The data of these important modes can be saved, which can help to predict the low-frequency sound radiation of the same structure faster in the future.

Active control of structures and sound radiation modes and its application in vehicles

This paper presents computation of structural sound power and sound radiation modes, combined with structural dynamic equations to obtain the coupling relationship between sound and structures. As a result, the relationship between sound radiation modes of structures and structural vibration modes is established. The influence of the number and position of optimal secondary force sources on control of sound radiation modes is considered. Results show that sound radiation efficiency of sound radiation modes at the first order was more than that of sound radiation modes at other orders. The main diagonal element of coupling matrix between modes and sound radiation impedances was more than elements at other positions. Sound radiation modes at the first order were dominant sound radiation modes. When the number of secondary force sources was 4, the sound radiation power of structures was the lowest. Four force sources were taken as the basis to conduct on the related experiments in the anechoic chamber and compare with the computational result. Their results had a good consistency, which showed that the mentioned theory method was effective. Finally, the control strategy was applied to roofs of the vehicle. Experiments verified that sound pressure level of the driver in the low frequency was obviously improved, which remedied the defect of other optimization strategies for solving noises in the low frequency.

The Effect of Plate Discretization on Accuracy of the Sound Radiation Efficiency Measurements

This paper deals with the problem of the effect of discretization level and certain other parameters characterizing the measurement setup on accuracy of the process of determination of the sound radiation efficiency by means of the Discrete Calculation Method (DCM) described by Hashimoto (2001). The idea behind DCM consists in virtual division of an examined sound radiating structure into rectangular elements each of which is further assumed to contribute to the total radiation effect in the same way as a rigid circular piston having the surface area equal to this of the corresponding virtual element and vibrating in an infinite rigid baffle. The advantage of the method over conventional sound radiation efficiency measurement techniques consists in the fact that instead of acoustic pressure values, source (plate) vibration velocity amplitude values are measured in a selected number of regularly distributed points. In many cases, this allows to determine the sound radiation efficiency with sufficient accuracy, especially for the low frequency regime. The key part of the paper is an analysis of the effect of discretization level (i.e. the choice of the number of points at which vibration amplitude measurements are to be taken with the use of accelerometers) on results obtained with the use of the method and their accuracy. The problem of determining an optimum level of discretization for given excitation frequency range is a very important issue as the labor intensity (time-consuming aspect) of the method is one of its main flaws. As far as the technical aspect of the method is concerned, two different geometrical configurations of the measurement setup were tested.