Acoustic Characteristics Parameters of Polyurethane/Rice Husk Composites

The interest of this article lies in the proposition of develop the relationship of the adding of Rice Husk (RH) and acoustic characteristic parameters of Polyurethane (PU) foam. In this article, different amount of RH (2%, 5%, and 8%) was employed into the formation of PU foam system. A rapid method based on professional acoustic measurement was used to determine the acoustic characteristic parameters of the PU foam and PU-RH composites, such as porosity, flow resistance, tortuosity, and characteristic constants, and analyze the effect of RH on the acoustic characteristic parameters. The measured results indicated that the sound absorption coefficients of PU-RH composites increased at low frequency along with a small decrease at high frequency on the addition of RH. And adding more RH will be helpful to improve the low-frequency sound absorption performance of PU foam without increasing the thickness. With the increase of RH additive amount, the flow resistance decreased first and then increased, while the porosity declined slowly generally. Overall, the PU-RH composite containing 5% RH showed the most satisfactory absorption performance. POLYM. COMPOS., 40:2653-2661, 2019. (c) 2018 Society of Plastics Engineers