On the use of a component mode synthesis technique to investigate the effects of elastic boundary conditions on the transmission loss of baffled plates

In this paper, it is shown that the structural and acoustic response of an elastically-supported baffled plate excited by a plane wave or a diffuse field can be solved efficiently using a free-interface component mode synthesis technique, in which the elastic support is considered as a mass-less structural component characterized solely by a flexibility matrix. The presented method is applied to the calculation of the transmission loss of plates with different boundary stiffness and is shown to be well adapted to parameter studies and optimization. The convergence of the technique is investigated and an example of parameter study is presented. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.