Viscothermal fluid effects on vibro-acoustic behaviour of double elastic panels

This paper deals with the vibro-acoustic behaviour of two vibrating plates coupled to a viscothermal fluid cavity. The acousto-elastic model is established in dimensionless appropriate form including the effects of viscosity and thermal conductivity of fluid and taking into account the fluid–structure interaction. The finite element method is used for the discretization of the functional of energy, which gives after minimization a symmetrical coupled matrix system in which the acoustic matrices are frequency dependent. For this purpose, an iterative procedure is derived to determine the eigenmodes of the coupled system. The modal approach is adopted to determine the vibro-acoustic system's response which the numerical results show the importance of the viscothermal effects in the case of thin fluid layers.