Abstract
Several noise sources such as machinery with rotating or reciprocating parts routinely produce high levels of noise in narrow frequency ranges lying in the neighbourhood of the rotating or reciprocating frequency and their harmonics. When enclosures are used to isolate such noise sources, peak response might be observed at these frequency ranges due both to increased excitation amplitude and resonating phenomena caused by the interaction of the excitation with the acoustic modes of the enclosure. Especially in the low frequency range and for low or intermediate wall absorption, the acoustic response of the enclosure is modal and these peak responses can be intense. This paper proposes a methodology to minimize the effect of narrow-frequency-band noise by redistribution of the acoustic modes of the insulating enclosure. This can be achieved by shifting the enclosure acoustic modes away from the excitation frequency so as to make superimposed resonating phenomena less intense. For that, several variable geometric modifications of the enclosure walls are introduced. The magnitude of those modifications that will lead to sparse mode distribution in the neighbourhood of the excitation frequency is estimated by means of a combined finite element-optimisation method. The above methodology is applied to an orthogonal enclosure and two different narrow-band loads in the neighbourhood of 90 and 120 Hz are studied. It is shown that, for each frequency load, a feasible set of geometric modifications can be found so as for the neighbouring modes to be shifted and, consecutively, for resonating effects to be made less intense. Furthermore it is shown that feasible solution to the problem of simultaneous control of noise having two or more intense excitation frequencies is also attainable.
