Modal Overlap Factor of a beam with an acoustic black hole termination

An Acoustic Black Hole (ABH) effect is a passive vibration reduction technique which takes advantage of properties of wave propagation in thin structures of varying thickness. A practical implementation of ABH on a uniform beam consists in an extremity whose thickness follows a power-law profile covered by a very thin layer of additional damping material. A modal analysis based on a High Resolution technique shows that the ABH significantly increases the Modal Overlap Factor (MOF) of the beam, thus reducing the resonant behaviour of the structure. Further investigations, including a two-dimensional numerical model of the structure based on the finite difference method, show that this MOF can be explained by an increase of the modal density and a high damping of a number of modes of the structure due to the ABH.