SOUND-STRUCTURE INTERACTION ANALYSIS OF COMPOSITE PANELS USING COUPLED BOUNDARY AND FINITE-ELEMENT METHODS

Sound-structure interaction problems frequently arise in the aerospace and automotive industries. In this paper, the boundary element method is coupled with the finite element method to accurately model sound-s tructure interaction of a composite panel resting on an acoustic cavit y. First, the approach is validated by comparing the numerical solutio ns with known analytical and experimental results for isotropic panels . However, for composite panels, exact solutions are difficult or impo ssible to compute. Also, until today, very little effort has been made to obtain experimental results for composite panels undergoing sound- structure interaction. As the first step toward exploring this area of sound-structure interaction, this study offers numerical results on a n acoustic cavity-backed composite panel by harnessing the strengths o f the coupled BEM-FEM technique. The results indicate that the transmi ssion loss values for composite panels are very sensitive to the lamin ation angle of the fibers in the different layers of the composite pan el. (C) 1995 Acoustical Society of America.