Vibroacoustic analysis of a sandwich panel coupled with an enclosure cavity

Sandwich panels have important advantages and are widely used in aerospace, automobile and railway industries. Acoustical characteristics and behavior of sandwich panels are considered as one of important aspects of their design. It is particularly important to investigate the structure-borne sound transmission through sandwich panels employed in aircrafts and trains. Interaction between acoustic spaces and sandwich structures must thoroughly be taken into consideration for such applications. Vibroacoustic analysis of a sandwich panel coupled with an air cavity is therefore carried out in this paper. An analytical approach is used for this purpose and the free and forced responses of the system are investigated. The vibroacoustic response of the analytical model is obtained in Laplace domain. Durbin’s formula is then utilized to find the time response of the system. A parametric study is finally carried out to investigate effect of different parameters on the vibroacoustic characteristics of the structure. It is shown that the presence of the air cavity results in a significant influence on the dynamical behavior of the coupled system.