Aircraft Cabin Noise Control with Acoustic Metamaterials Seminar

The thermal-acoustic insulation of passenger aircraft cabins has not changed much over the past decades.

However, with an increasing demand for more fuel-efficient propulsion technologies to meet upcoming requirements for more sustainable air transport comes along a big acoustical challenge: The noise generated by these new engines will contain low-frequency tonal noise that can impair the health of the crew cabin and the comfort of the passengers significantly, if the design of current aircraft cabins remains unchanged. Since the 2000s, acoustic metamaterials have come up as a new way for controlling the propagation and insulation of sound, particularly suitable for the control of low-frequency tonal noise. Thus, the aircraft industry has a huge interest in using these metamaterials to improve cabin comfort of future aircraft generations.

In this seminar, recent research results on the application of acoustic metamaterials to aircraft cabin noise control will be presented.

The talk will start with a summary of the state-of-the-art in aircraft cabin side wall design and the acoustical challenges that future aircraft generations will face.

Then, the concept of acoustic metamaterials and their advantages for potential applications in aircraft cabin noise control will be introduced.

Research results for two types of acoustic metamaterials will be presented in more detail:

• First, thin and lightweight plate-type acoustic metamaterials that can be easily embedded inside the current thermal-acoustic insulation blankets.
• Secondly, lightweight Helmholtz-resonators made of closed-cell foam that can be used to increase the sound transmission loss of the aircraft side wall over a broad frequency range.

The seminar will conclude with an outlook and current challenges for the application of acoustic metamaterials in aircraft cabins.

Speaker Internal: Dr Felix Langfeldt

Felix Langfeldt gained nearly 10 years of research experience in acoustics and vibration control as a researcher at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany. He obtained his PhD in 2018 and throughout his career he collaborated closely with industrial partners like Airbus or 3M to develop innovative acoustic treatments (with particular focus on acoustic metamaterials) that can be used in aircraft cabins to reduce low-frequency tonal noise. In September 2021 he joined the Institute of Sound & Vibration Research in Southampton as a Visiting Academic, funded by an independent fellowship from the German Research Council. Following the fellowship, Felix will become a Lecturer at the ISVR, Signal Processing, Audio and Hearing Group, in March 2022.

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