Experimental investigation of the sound absorption performance of compartmented Helmholtz resonators

An experiment was derived in the present study to investigate the effects of coupling up two Helmholtz resonators on their overall sound absorption performance. The effect of compartmenting the cavity of a resonator on its sound absorption property was also discussed. Such cavity compartmentation in fact creates a coupled resonator with a front and a rear resonator. The results show that the coupling in many cases can improve the sound absorption capacity and widen the working bandwidth of the resonators provided that the uncoupled resonance frequency of the front resonator is larger than or equal to that of the rear resonator. Results also suggest that the best compartmentation is that with these uncoupled resonance frequencies very close to each other. It is also found that the undamped plane wave approach is sufficient to predict the resonance frequencies of the coupled resonators within engineering tolerance. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.