Design and Performance of Acoustic Metamaterial Structure for Inlet Duct Noise Attenuation

To control noise emission from internal combustion inlet, designers often choose small chamber type silencers at the inlet. In order to improve the inlet acoustic efficiency, inlet ducts with improved acoustic attenuation can be used. One potentially applicable material is acoustic metamaterial rapidly gaining popularity in different fields of engineering application. Small engine inlet duct, designed by using acoustic metamaterial structure comprising an array of resonators inside the wall of a rigid duct is investigated in this study. Experimental investigation of different designs is performed to characterize the acoustic behavior in terms of transmission loss (TL). By connecting multiple resonators of different size and location it is shown that a broadband TL can be achieved. The resulted attenuation band can be tuned by varying the resonator physical characteristics, showing promising potentials such of the material in the described application.