Normalized stiffness ratios for mechanical characterization of isotropic acoustic foams

This paper presents a method for the mechanical characterization of isotropic foams at low frequency. The objective of this study is to determine the Young's modulus, the Poisson's ratio, and the loss factor of commercially available foam plates. The method is applied on porous samples having square and circular sections. The main idea of this work is to perform quasi-static compression tests of a single foam sample followed by two juxtaposed samples having the same dimensions. The load and displacement measurements lead to a direct extraction of the elastic constants by means of normalized stiffness and normalized stiffness ratio which depend on Poisson's ratio and shape factor. The normalized stiffness is calculated by the finite element method for different Poisson ratios. The no-slip boundary conditions imposed by the loading rigid plates create interfaces with a complex strain distribution. Beforehand, compression tests were performed by means of a standard tensile machine in order to determine the appropriate pre-compression rate for quasi-static tests.

Vibroacoustic response sensitivity due to relative alignment of two anisotropic poro-elastic layers

The effects of relative alignment of two different types of anisotropic open cell porous materials are investigated in terms of the acoustic response of a multi-layered configuration. Numerical experiments, where gradient based optimization techniques were used, are conducted to find possible extremal values. It is shown that, depending on the degree of anisotropy of the porous material properties, their angular orientations have a significant and frequency dependent influence on the measured response. The results highlight the importance of further advancing the knowledge of anisotropic porous material behavior.