Sound Absorption Predictions of Multiple Layer Porous Materials and Test Validations

Acoustical sound absorption materials are widely applied in many industries for the noise mitigation purposes. There is always a challenge how to optimize an absorption package by balancing the weight, cost and performance. To do that, the computer models, which can quickly and precisely simulate the absorption coefficients of the acoustical materials, play the key roles. In this paper, a MATLAB based tool to predict the sound absorption coefficients of multiple layer porous materials has been developed, which can predict the both normal and random incident absorption coefficients of the multiple layer acoustical materials including the surface imperious screens. By giving baseline parameters and noise target, this tool can provide the room noise design curves in terms of the variations of the thicknesses and sizes of the multiple layer absorbers. The predicted results were compared to the test data from some published papers and the measurements done in our lab. Good correlations were observed.