Study of acoustic response of anisotropic steel structures

Abstract

The purpose of our experiment is to learn the influence of stiffening on the acoustic response of steel plates. The investigation is carried out on a rectangular plate that is clamped in an opening (1.20 × 2 m2) between a reverberant room and a test room. The sound transmission loss is determined by using two different methods: a method that is based on the sound pressure measurement and the two-microphone intensity method. The mean radiation efficiency is obtained by measuring the panel vibration velocity with a regular mesh. The measurements are made over a frequency range from 250 to 10 000 Hz for a diffuse field excitation. The following series of samples is tested: a 1.5-mm-thick-steel plate; a plate reinforced with uniformly spaced tubular stiffeners; a plate reinforced with uniformly spaced line stiffeners; and a corrugated panel (the space between the corrugations is the same as the space between the stiffeners). The acoustic effect of variation of bending stiffness is discussed, and all the experimental results provide comparison elements for computed results.