Measurement of the absorption coefficient of sound absorbing materials under a synthesized diffuse acoustic field

This letter proposes an experimental method to estimate the absorption coefficient of sound absorbing materials under a synthesized diffuse acoustic field in free-field conditions. Comparisons are made between experiments conducted with this approach, the standard reverberant room method, and numerical simulations using the transfer matrix method. With a simple experimental setup and smaller samples than those required by standards, the results obtained with the proposed approach do not exhibit non-physical trends of the reverberant room method and provide absorption coefficients in good agreement with those obtained by simulations for a laterally infinite material.