The sound insulation of single leaf finite size rectangular plywood panels with orthotropic frequency dependent...

Current theories for predicting the sound insulation of orthotropic materials are limited to a small range of infinite panels. This paper presents a method that allows for the prediction of the sound insulation of a finite size orthotropic panel. This method uses an equation for the forced radiation impedance of a finite size rectangular panel. This approach produces an equation that has three nested integrals. The long numerical calculation times were reduced by using approximate formulas for the azimuthally averaged forced radiation impedance. This reduced the number of nested integrals from three to two. The resulting predictions are compared to results measured using two sample sizes of four different thicknesses of plywood and one sample size of another three different thicknesses of plywood. Plywood was used for all the tests because it is somewhat orthotropic. It was found during testing that the Young's moduli of the plywood were dependent on the frequency of excitation. The influence of the frequency dependent Young's moduli was then included in the prediction method. The experimental results were also compared with a simple isotropic prediction method.