Numerical investigation of sound transmission through single and double walls with periodic arrays of resonators

Lightweight partition walls are widely used in buildings, especially nowadays when sustainability is of a major interest. At the same time noise pollution is becoming a growing problem across the globe. All this implies the need to find possible solutions for sound insulation improvement of the lightweight partitions. This paper is focused on exploring the possibilities of exploiting the dynamic effects of periodic subwavelength arrays of resonators for sound insulation enhancement. In order to improve the sound transmission loss in a specific frequency region, periodic resonant units are tuned and introduced to single and double panels. It can be shown that the resonance mode of the resonators couples with the host plate vibration in the way of breaking the mass law and overcoming some phenomena like coincidence effect and mass-air-mass resonance. The investigation of the considered panels under acoustic field excitation is conducted using different methods. Sound transmission loss curves and dispersion diagrams are calculated. Finite element method is employed for this purpose, but also the theory of three-dimensional elasticity and well-known transfer matrix method (TMM). Several designs of resonators are proposed.