Application of a porous media model for the acoustic damping of perforated plate absorbers

Perforated panel, or plate, absorbers are commonly employed to reduce sound pressure levels across a broad range of applications including the built environment, industrial installations and propulsion devices. The acoustic performance of a perforated plate absorber depends upon a number of parameters such as physical geometry of the absorber, acoustic spectrum and sound pressure level of the acoustic source. As a consequence, experimental determination of acoustic properties is often required on an individual basis in order to optimise performance. Computational simulation of a perforated plate absorber would alleviate the necessity for experimental characterisation. Fundamentally this can be achieved by the direct numerical solution of the underlying governing equations, the compressible form of the Navier-Stokes equations. The numerical methodology is available and routinely implemented as a Computational Fluid Dynamics solver. However, the numerical simulation of flow through a perforated plate with a large number of very small orifices would require significant computational resource, not routinely available for engineering design simulations. In this paper, a porous media model, implemented as a sub-model within a CFD solver, is investigated and validated against a number of well-acknowledged acoustic experiments undertaken in an impedance tube, fora sound pressure wave incident normal to a perforated plate. The model expresses the underlying governing equations within the perforated plates in terms of a pseudo-physical velocity representation. Comparison between three dimensional, compressible, laminar flow CFD simulations and experimental data, demonstrate that the porous model is able to represent acoustic properties of perforated plate absorbers in linear and non-linear absorption regimes and also the inertial effect in the presence of a mean bias flow. The model significantly reduces the computational resource required in comparison to full geometric resolution and is thus a promising tool for the engineering design of perforated plate absorbers. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.