Enhancing the sound transmission loss of a single panel in the coincidence-controlled region through theoretical optimization of metamateral design

Abstract

The lightweight design of partition walls is in line with the new green building trend, due to which the gypsum panel is a highly demanded building material. As a result of present-day life dynamics which increases noise pollution, new challenges are posed for further improvement of sound insulation. All this implies the need for evolution of the classical partition systems, and metamaterials are considered as a promising solution. This paper is concerned with an analytical optimization of the sound insulation performance in the coincidence region of a gypsum board as a host structure with periodically attached locally resonant units, with subwavelength size of the unit cell. The spring-mass resonators have been designed to interact with the flexural waves in the host structure in the specific tuned range in order to overcome the coincidence effect. Using the effective medium (EM) method and plane wave expansion (PWE) method, the sound transmission loss (STL) curves and the dispersion curves have been calculated. Based on the dispersion plots, detection of the band gaps is made possible, which can also be confirmed in the STL curves. This theoretical design can bring potential ideas for improving the sound insulation of partition systems that include plasterboard.