A Numerical Study of a Method for Estimating Sound Absorption Coefficient under a Synthesized Diffuse Acoustic Field 2016-01-1847

A method for estimating the sound absorption coefficient of a material under a synthesized Diffuse Acoustic Field was recently proposed, as an alternative to classical sound absorption measurements in reverberant rooms (Robin O., Berry A., Doutres O., Atalla N., ‘Measurement of the absorption coefficient of absorbing materials under a synthesized diffuse acoustic field’, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 136 (1) EL13-EL19, 2014). Using sound field reproduction approaches and a synthetic array of acoustic monopoles facing the material, estimation of the sound absorption coefficient under a reproduced Diffuse Acoustic Field in a hemi-anechoic room was shown to be feasible. The method was successfully tested on a few samples of melamine foam of close thicknesses and areas, but the influence of several parameters such as the source height, or the samples dimensions together with the nature of the porous material was not fully investigated.

In this paper, the robustness of the method is numerically studied by examining the influence of the aforementioned parameters on the estimated sound absorption coefficient, with various square samples of homogeneous materials and a synthetic array of fixed dimensions. The principle of the method will be first recalled, and the main results of these numerical experiments will be then reported.