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The Oberst method is widely used for the measurement of the mechanical properties of viscoelastic or damping materials. The application of this method, as described in the ASTM E756 standard, gives good results as long as the experimental set-up does not interfere with the system under test. The main difficulty is to avoid adding damping and mass to the beam owing to the excitation and response measurement. In this paper, a method is proposed to skirt those problems. The classical cantilever Oberst beam is replaced by a double sized free-free beam excited in its center. The analysis is based on a frequency response function measured between the imposed velocity at the center (measured with an accelerometer) and an arbitrary point on the beam (measured with a laser vibrometer). The composite beam (base beam + material) properties are first extracted from the measurement by an optimization algorithm. Young's modulus and structural damping coefficient of the material under test can be deduced using classical formulations of the ASTM E756 standard for typical materials or using a finite element model for more complex cases. An application to a thick and soft viscoelastic material is presented, the results are shown to be consistent with Kramers-Kronig relations.

An experimental method to estimate the acoustical parameters of perforated facings used for noise control applications is proposed. These perforating facings (also called screens) can be woven or non-woven fabrics or even micro-perforated plates (MPP). Following the work by Atalla and Sgard [J. Sound Vib. 303, 195-208 (2007)], the perforated facings are modeled as porous media composed with identical cylindrical perforations of circular cross-section. The acoustical parameters characterized with the proposed method are the radius of the perforations and the perforation rate (also named the open-porosity). These parameters are obtained from analytical expressions and a single measurement of the normal acoustic surface impedance of the perforated facing backed by an air cavity in a standing wave tube. The value of the static air flow resistivity can also be recovered with no additional assumption or measurement. In the case of a facing that contains perforations of an arbitrary shape, the radius parameter should be understood as a characteristic length of the visco-inertial dissipative effects. Results for two characterization examples (a low porosity screen and a high porosity one) are presented and discussed. Values of the estimated static air flow resistivity are compared with the results from direct measurements. Values of the predicted sound absorption coefficients are compared to the measured ones.

Porous media like air-saturated polymer foams with open cells, have a nontrivial frequency-dependent absorption that arises due to viscous and thermal effects at the scale of the rigid frame microstructure. In order to produce multiple scattering at ultrasonic frequencies, mesoscale scatterers are introduced in the porous medium host. The effective wave number of such a multiscale medium should take into account the peculiar absorption at the microscale and the multiple scattering at the mesoscale to describe precisely the propagation of a coherent acoustic wave. For this purpose, a simple model is developed. First, an equivalent fluid model, derived from a homogenization method, is used to describe the acoustic propagation in the host porous medium itself. Second, the scattering by the inclusions is described with a multiple scattering approximation (independent scattering approximation). This simple model allows to obtain the total effective wave number of the porous medium with mesoscale scatterers. After some validating results on the multiple scattering by an array of rigid cylinders in air, experiments on the multiple scattering by rigid cylinders embedded in a porous medium are presented and compared to the developed simple model. Incidentally, it appears that for the host medium itself, the equivalent fluid model is not capable to describe the high-frequency behavior whilst a multiple scattering approach with (thin) viscous and thermal boundary layers around the scatterers is accurate in the whole frequency range.