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Ventilative meta-window with broadband low-frequency acoustic insulation

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Ventilative meta-window with broadband
low-frequency acoustic insulation
Cite as: J. Appl. Phys. 129, 094901 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0042384
Submitted: 30 December 2020 . Accepted: 10 February 2021 . Published Online: 01 March 2021

Jinjie Shi, Chenkai Liu, Xiaozhou Liu, and Yun Lai

COLLECTIONS

Paper published as part of the special topic on Acoustic Metamaterials 2021

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J. Appl. Phys. 129, 094901 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0042384 129, 094901

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Ventilative meta-window with broadband

low-frequency acoustic insulation
Cite as: J. Appl. Phys. 129, 094901 (2021); doi: 10.1063/5.0042384
Submitted: 30 December 2020 · Accepted: 10 February 2021 · View Online Export Citation CrossMark
Published Online: 1 March 2021

Jinjie Shi, Chenkai Liu, Xiaozhou Liu,a) and Yun Laia)

AFFILIATIONS
MOE Key Laboratory of Modern Acoustics, National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, School of Physics,
and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China

Note: This paper is part of the Special Topic on Acoustic Metamaterials 2021.
a)
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed: xzliu@nju.edu.cn and laiyun@nju.edu.cn

ABSTRACT
Soundproofing ventilation devices can block sound while allowing free airflow simultaneously, which have many important applications in
daily lives. In this work, we theoretically design and experimentally implement a broadband low-frequency acoustic meta-window. The
meta-window is composed of a central rectangular open area and 12 surrounding identical channels. The total ventilation area is 220 cm2.
Interestingly, with a deep subwavelength thickness of 4 cm, such a meta-window can exhibit a large acoustic bandgap, leading to the
effective blocking of more than 90% of the incident sound energy in the broad range of 605–1050 Hz. By cascading such acoustic devices,
the sound blocking effect can be further improved. Our work realizes a large-area and ultrathin ventilative meta-window with the function
of broadband low-frequency acoustic insulation.

Published under license by AIP Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0042384

I. INTRODUCTION proposed to simultaneously realize the functionalities of sound

As a long-standing topic in acoustics, sound insulation has insulation and ventilation. However, these approaches are usually
important applications in various fields, such as architectural design, limited in the range of working frequencies due to the underlying
urban planning, and transportation. However, the traditional devices resonant mechanism. Some efforts have been taken to broaden the
and phononic crystals developed to suppress and attenuate sound working frequency range, such as utilizing a consistently
are not applicable in low frequencies. Recently, acoustic quasi-Fano-like interference37 or multiple resonances,38 etc. These
metamaterials1–12 composed of subwavelength building blocks designs have enhanced the bandwidth to a certain extent but they
provide a new approach to manipulate the acoustic parameters and still face the issues of relatively higher working frequency range and
waves freely. Based on acoustic metamaterials, various novel phe- relatively larger thickness. Moreover, the ventilation area is still rel-
nomena and applications have been proposed, including cloaking atively small, which imposes a barrier toward real applications.
and radiation control,5,13–19 near-perfect absorption of sound,20–24 In this work, we consider the issue of sound insulation with
exotic elastic properties,4,25–27 topological phenomena,11,28–30 etc. ventilation from a different perspective. Instead of designing a com-
The development in acoustic metamaterials significantly enriches the posite structure, we start from a window of a relatively large open
physics of acoustics and may have important implications in many area and optimize the tunnel structures surrounding it to achieve
applications. the sound insulation functionality. The central rectangular open
The inherent low-frequency bandgaps in acoustic metamateri- area and 12 identical surrounding channels with a total ventilation
als make them perfect candidates for effective blocking of area of 220 cm2 allow air to access the meta-window freely. Such a
sound.1,3,31 However, conventional soundproofing devices have no structure is hereby denoted as a ventilative meta-window, as shown
passages and cannot allow airflow. In practice, sound insulation in Fig. 1(a). By introducing cascaded structures, we utilize the band
and ventilation are often required simultaneously. In order to solve structure analysis method to optimize the bandwidth of sound
this issue, several methods based on Fano-like interference,32 local insulation. By tuning the thickness of the meta-window to a critical
resonance,33,34 or metasurface-based techniques35,36 have been value of 4 cm, the original bands inside the low-frequency gap are

J. Appl. Phys. 129, 094901 (2021); doi: 10.1063/5.0042384 129, 094901-1

Published under license by AIP Publishing.
 Journal of ARTICLE scitation.org/journal/jap
Applied Physics

FIG. 1. (a) The designed meta-window, which is composed of two parts: the central rectangular open area and 12 identical surrounding channels. (b) Top view of the
meta-window and schematic cross section of a single channel in the x–z plane. The band structures of the meta-window for (c) H = 10 mm and (d) H = 40 mm. The
bandgap is marked in gray color. (e) Simulated transmission loss (TL) as a function of frequency for the meta-window with different unit cell numbers of N = 1 (H = 10 mm
and H = 40 mm) and N = 3 (H = 40 mm) along the z direction. (f ) Deaf band mode shapes of the meta-window at the Χ point marked as the red symbols in (d).

changed to be flat, therefore, increasing the sound insulation band- coming from different directions. We note that the structural thick-
width significantly. We find that such a meta-window can effec- ness is less than λ/10, where λ is the wavelength at the central fre-
tively block sound waves from all directions in a broadband range quency of the soundproofing bandwidth. By cascading such
of low frequencies. More than 90% of incident sound energy is devices, the sound blocking effect can be further improved.
effectively blocked in the range of 605–1050 Hz for sound waves Compared with the previous designs, our approach using band

J. Appl. Phys. 129, 094901 (2021); doi: 10.1063/5.0042384 129, 094901-2

Published under license by AIP Publishing.
 Journal of ARTICLE scitation.org/journal/jap
Applied Physics

structure optimization is quite effective, which results in a design The simulated transmission loss (TL) as a function of the fre-
with a lower working frequency range and a smaller thickness of quency for the meta-window with different unit cell numbers of
structure simultaneously. Our work, thus, may have important N = 1 and 3 with H = 40 mm is plotted in Fig. 1(e) (red solid line
implications in soundproofing ventilation devices. and blue solid line), respectively, which is performed by full-wave
simulations of COMSOL. For simplification, we have neglected the
loss in the system. It is seen that when N = 1, the transmission loss
increases at about 554 Hz, and the whole soundproofing bandwidth
II. THEORY AND DESIGN ranges from 668 Hz to 942 Hz. The sound insulation performance
The diagram of the designed meta-window is shown in for −10 dB is observed in the range of 614–1038 Hz. We note that
Fig. 1(a) with ax = 425 mm, ay = 194 mm, and H = 40 mm. It is a the particular wavelength at 826 Hz (λ = 415 mm) is more than
multi-pipe structure consisting of a central rectangular open area ten times larger than the thickness of the meta-window, i.e.,
and 12 surrounding identical channels. The 12 channels are sepa- H = 40 mm, confirming that the meta-window works at the deep
rated by rigid walls to eliminate the couplings between the neigh- subwavelength scale. Furthermore, when N = 3, the simulated
boring channels. The top of Fig. 1(b) shows the top view of the results show better sound insulation performance. For comparison,
meta-window. The central rectangular open area has a width of the transmission profile for the case of H = 10 mm clearly shows
D1 = 60 mm and a length of D2 = 126 mm. The cross-sectional sizes only two soundproofing frequencies at the frequencies of Fano res-
of the surrounding channels are chosen as a = 40 mm and onances, i.e., 570 Hz and 1100 Hz, respectively. In the numerical
b = 30 mm. For clarity, the schematic cross section of a single simulations, the material of the meta-window is viewed as acousti-
channel in the x–z plane is shown at the bottom of Fig. 1(b). The cally rigid, and the constitutive parameters used for air are set as
thickness of the walls is set as t = 2 mm. The connected blue arrows ρ0 = 1.21 kg/m3 and c0 = 343 m/s. Therefore, through the band
denote the sound propagating path inside the surrounding engineering method, a large bandgap is constructed with flatbands
channels with a total length of L. and deaf bands inside, leading to a much larger soundproofing
In order to understand the underlying physics behind the bandwidth than that before optimization.
meta-window, the band structures of the propagating modes along
the ГΧ direction have been calculated by Comsol Multiphysics, as III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
shown in Figs. 1(c) and 1(d). Here, cascaded structures in the
z direction are considered. Two extra air regions of 45 mm thick- In order to experimentally verify the soundproofing effect, the
ness are added to the central rectangular open area [shown in the transmission experiments have been performed, as shown in Fig. 2.
blue dotted box in Fig. 1(a)] to make the structure periodic along An anechoic room is utilized to minimize reflection and noise. The
the propagating direction. The parts outside the blue dotted box sample is fabricated by stereolithography 3D printing techniques
may be embedded in the wall that supports the meta-window struc- using Polylactide. Figures 2(a) and 2(b) show the diagram and
ture. The band structure of the case of H = 10 mm is shown in
Fig. 1(c). It is clearly seen that two resonances located at f = 570 Hz
and 1100 Hz (marked as red symbols) appear at the low-frequency
regime due to the Fano interferences between the central open area
and the surrounding channels, which could be explained by the
asymmetric transmission profiles plotted in black solid lines in
Fig. 1(e). Indeed, the transmission dips induced by the Fano-like
interferences have been designed to attenuate the sound waves
before.32,37 However, as shown in Fig. 1(c), the frequency regime
between the f = 570 Hz and 1100 Hz is spanned by two bands,
which destroys the broadband acoustic insulation effect.
Interestingly, when H increases to 40 mm, those bands inside the
bandgap turn flat, and, thus, the soundproofing bandwidth broad-
ens significantly, as shown in Fig. 1(d). A bandgap (gray domain)
is observed in Fig. 1(d), indicating broadband soundproofing prop-
erties. It should be mentioned that the lowest branch (red dots) in
the bandgap is almost a flatband, which has little effect on trans-
mission. Moreover, it is clearly observed that there are also two
branches (blue dots) at the upper edge of the bandgap. We investi-
gate the eigenmodes at the Χ point marked as blue symbols in
Fig. 1(d), as shown in Fig. 1(f ). The eigenmodes are found to be
antisymmetric in the y and x directions for the 897 Hz and the
962 Hz modes, respectively. Such antisymmetric band mode shapes
are well known as the deaf bands,39 which cannot be excited by an FIG. 2. (a) Diagram and (b) photograph of the experimental setups. (c)
Simulated and measured transmittance as a function of frequency for
incident plane wave along the ГΧ direction. Thus, the frequency H = 40 mm.
range from 554 Hz to 1068 Hz is considered as a large bandgap.

J. Appl. Phys. 129, 094901 (2021); doi: 10.1063/5.0042384 129, 094901-3

Published under license by AIP Publishing.
 Journal of ARTICLE scitation.org/journal/jap
Applied Physics

FIG. 3. Simulated acoustic transmittance of the designed meta-window varying with (a) the thickness, (b) the total length of the surrounding channels, and (c) the width of
the central open area. Blue dotted lines in the colormaps show the selected parameters in our design.

photography of the experimental setup. A speaker array (HiVi B1S) 60 mm, the central open area no longer plays a major role in the
under the reflection of a parabolic concave mirror is used to gener- engineering of the bandwidth. In all figures, the blue dotted lines
ate quasi-plane waves in the range of 550 Hz–1150 Hz and of in the colormaps represent the selected parameters in our theoreti-
65 cm away from the sample. A microphone (GRAS 46BE) is cal and experimental design. As discussed above, the designed
placed on a moving stage to record the sound pressure at different meta-window exhibits extraordinary adaptability that allows cus-
positions. In the measurements, the sample is tightly fitted to the tomized acoustic soundproofing.
rear glass cover to prevent the sound from leakage. The transmission We further investigate the dependence of soundproofing effect
is measured in the blue rectangular area in Fig. 2(a). In Fig. 2(c), we on the incident angle. In practice, the performance of the sound-
demonstrate the simulated and measured transmittance as a function proofing should be insensitive to the incident angles so as to be
of frequency. The transmittance of sound energy is a normalized useful. Figure 4(a) shows the simulated transmittance through the
quantity defined as |p/p0|2, where p and p0 denote the sound pres- meta-window as a function of the frequency under oblique inci-
sure (measured in Pa) with and without the meta-window, respec- dence. The simulated results prove that the broadband characteris-
tively. It is observed that the experimental results agree well with the tic of the meta-window is almost unaffected for a wide-angle range
simulations. Such a meta-window can block more than 90% of inci- of incident angles. Only the upper edge of the soundproofing band-
dent sound energy in the range of 605–1050 Hz (experimental data). width is shifted slightly toward the lower frequency under oblique
The slight discrepancy between the measured and simulated results incidence. It is induced by the excitation of the deaf bands for an
may come from the viscous effect that removes sharp resonances incident plane wave under oblique incidence.
and the spatial reflection. Figure 4(b) shows the simulated acoustic filed distribution and
In the following, we have investigated the dependence of the velocity fields on a cut plane under oblique incidence at 668 Hz.
transmission properties on different geometrical parameters of the The black lines represent the stream and orientation of the local
meta-window structure, as shown in Figs. 3(a)–3(c). When one
geometric parameter is varying, all the other parameters are set as
fixed. Figure 3(a) shows the simulated acoustic transmittance as
functions of the frequency and the thickness of the meta-window.
We clearly observe that the sound insulation performance changes
from narrowband to broadband as H increases, which is consistent
with the previous band structure analysis. When H is increased to
40 mm, the bandwidth for acoustic transmittance less than 10%
reaches the large regime of 605–1050 Hz. While further increasing
of H leads to impedance mismatch between the central open area
and surrounding channels and hence results in a narrower band-
width. Next, the length of the surrounding channel is considered in
Fig. 3(b). It is seen that the sound insulation is shifted to a lower
frequency when L increases, and this property can be utilized to
select the soundproofing bandwidth. Figure 3(c) illustrates the
simulated transmittance as functions of frequency and the width of FIG. 4. (a) Simulated acoustic transmittance through the meta-window for differ-
ent incident angles of θi = 0°, 30°, and 60°. (b) Simulated acoustic filed distribu-
the central open area. We find that the bandwidth of sound insula-
tions for oblique incident angles of 0°, 30°, and 60° at the frequency of 668 Hz.
tion increases effectively as D1 decreases. When it is decreased to

J. Appl. Phys. 129, 094901 (2021); doi: 10.1063/5.0042384 129, 094901-4

Published under license by AIP Publishing.
 Journal of ARTICLE scitation.org/journal/jap
Applied Physics

velocity field. It is observed that the pressure amplitude through 4

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