Sound transmission properties of honeycomb panels and double-walled structures

Sammanfattning: Sandwich panels with aluminium face sheets and honeycomb core material have certain advantages over panels made of wood. Some of the advantages of these constructions are low weight, good moisture properties, fire resistance and high stiffness to-weight ratio etc. As product development is carried out in a fast pace today, there is a strong need for validated prediction tools to assist during early design stages. In this thesis, tools are developed for predicting the sound transmission through honeycomb panels, typical for inner floors in trains and later through double-walled structures typical for rail-vehicles, aircrafts and ships.The sandwich theory for wave propagation and standard orthotropic plate theory is used to predict the sound transmission loss of honeycomb panels. Honeycomb is an anisotropic material which when used as a core in a sandwich panel, results in a panel with anisotropic properties. In this thesis, honeycomb panels are treated as being orthotropic and the wavenumbers are calculated for the two principal directions. The wavenumbers are then used to calculate the sound transmission using standard orthotropic theory. These predictions are validated with results from sound transmission measurements. The influence of constrained layer damping treatments on the sound transmission loss of these panels is investigated. Results show that, after the damping treatment, the sound transmission loss of an acoustically bad panel and a normal pane lare very similar.Further, sound transmission through a double-leaf partition based on a honeycomb panel with periodic stiffeners is investigated. The structural response of the periodic structure due to a harmonic excitation is expressed in terms of a series of space harmonics and virtual work theory is applied to calculate the sound transmission. The original model is refined to include sound absorption in the cavity and to account for the orthotropic property of the honeycomb panels. Since the solution of the space harmonic analysis is obtained in a series form, a sufficient number of terms has to be included in the calculation to ensure small errors. Computational accuracy needs to be balanced with computational cost as calculation times increases with the number of terms. A new criterion is introduced which reduces the computational time by up to a factor ten for the panels studied. For all the double-leaf systems analysed, the sound transmission loss predictions from the periodic model with the space harmonic expansion method are shown to compare well with laboratory measurements.