Using Finite Element Analysis in the Design of a Loudspeaker Cone

Traditionally, a loudspeaker cone is developed via a trial and error process that relies heavily on educated guesses. Unfortunately, the success of such guesses can only be evaluated by prototyping a design and making measurements. It can take several tooling iterations to achieve the desired performance and this process can be both time consuming and expensive. By employing FEA, the dynamic behavior of a cone can be predicted and a significant number of iterations in the design process can be eliminated. However, performance indicators such as frequency response and distortion are not readily calculated by the FEA software. This paper examines additional software tools that were developed to process the output of an FEA package and yield easily interpreted approximations of how well a cone will perform. Shortcomings of both the FEA models and the post processing techniques are discussed. The latter portion of the paper presents a real life application where the developed tools were used to reduce the distortion in a loudspeaker cone.