This paper reports the results of reproducibility experiments on the interlaboratory characterization of the acoustical properties of three types of consolidated porous media: granulated porous rubber, reticulated foam, and fiberglass. The measurements are conducted in several independent laboratories in Europe and North America. The studied acoustical characteristics are the surface complex acoustic impedance at normal incidence and plane wave absorption coefficient which are determined using the standard impedance tube method. The paper provides detailed procedures related to sample preparation and installation and it discusses the dispersion in the acoustical material property observed between individual material samples and laboratories. The importance of the boundary conditions, homogeneity of the porous material structure, and stability of the adopted signal processing method are highlighted.

Numerical approaches based on finite element discretizations of Biot's poroelasticity equations provide efficient tools to solve problems where the porous material is coupled to elastic structures and finite extent acoustic cavities. Sometimes, it may be relevant to evaluate the radiation of a poroelastic material into an infinite fluid medium. Examples include ͑i͒ the evaluation of the diffuse field sound absorption coefficient of a porous material and/or the sound transmission loss of an elastic plate coupled to a porous sheet, ͑ii͒ the assessment of the acoustic radiation damping of a porous material coupled to a vibrating structure. The latter is particularly important for the correct experimental characterization of the intrinsic damping of the material's frame. Up to now, the acoustic radiation of a porous medium into an unbounded fluid medium has usually been neglected. The classical approaches for modeling free field radiation of porous materials ͑i͒ assumes the interstitial pressure at the radiation surface to be zero or ͑ii͒ fixes the radiation impedance to an approximate value. This paper discusses the limitations of these assumptions and presents a numerical formulation for evaluating the sound radiation of baffled poroelastic media including fluid loading effects. The problem is solved using a mixed FEM-BEM approach where the fluid loading is accounted for using an admittance matrix. Both numerical examples and a transmission loss test are presented to illustrate the performance of the technique and its applications.

There is a considerable number of research publications on the characterization of porous media that is carried out in accordance with ISO 10534-2 (International Standards Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 2001) and/or ISO 9053 (International Standards Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 1991). According to the Web of ScienceTM (last accessed 22 September 2016) there were 339 publications in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America alone which deal with the acoustics of porous media. However, the reproducibility of these characterization procedures is not well understood. This paper deals with the reproducibility of some standard characterization procedures for acoustic porous materials. The paper is an extension of the work published by Horoshenkov, Khan, Bécot, Jaouen, Sgard, Renault, Amirouche, Pompoli, Prodi, Bonfiglio, Pispola, Asdrubali, Hübelt, Atalla, Amédin, Lauriks, and Boeckx [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 122(1), 345-353 (2007)]. In this paper, independent laboratory measurements were performed on the same material specimens so that the naturally occurring inhomogeneity in materials was controlled. It also presented the reproducibility data for the characteristic impedance, complex wavenumber, and for some related pore structure properties. This work can be helpful to better understand the tolerances of these material characterization procedures so improvements can be developed to reduce experimental errors and improve the reproducibility between laboratorie

This article reports numerical and experimental results concerning the estimation of the diffuse field sound absorption coefficient of several different materials under a synthetized diffuse acoustic field excitation in laboratory and in situ conditions. The proposed measurement method is based on a sound field reproduction approach and a synthetic array of acoustic monopoles facing the material to be tested. Numerical simulations are first conducted to optimize the geometrical parameters of the method and to compute theoretical sound absorption coefficients of the considered materials. Measurements on a set of six typical acoustic materials are then conducted following the standardized reverberant room method as well as the proposed approach in a hemi-anechoic room and in two realistic rooms. Albeit showing limitations in the low-frequency domain, the proposed method enables a significant reduction of the tested specimen dimensions compared with the reverberant room method and allows performing tests in non-ideal acoustic environments.

Enclosures are commonly used to reduce the sound exposure of workers to the noise radiated by machinery. Some acoustic predictive tools ranging from simple analytical tools to sophisticated numerical deterministic models are available to estimate the enclosure acoustical performance. However, simple analytical models are usually valid in limited frequency ranges because of underlying assumptions whereas numerical models are commonly limited to low frequencies. This paper presents a general and simple model for predicting the acoustic performance of large free-standing enclosures which is capable of taking into account the complexity of the enclosure configuration and covering a large frequency range. It is based on the statistical energy analysis (SEA) framework. The sound field inside the enclosure is calculated using the method of image sources. Sound transmission across the various elements of the enclosure is considered in the SEA formalism. The model is evaluated by comparison with existing methods and experimental results. The effect of several parameters such as enclosure geometry, panel materials, presence of noise control treatments, location of the source inside the enclosure, and presence of an opening has been investigated. The comparisons between the model and the experimental results show a good agreement for most of the tested configurations.