Acoustical characterisation of porous sound absorbing materials: a review

Over the past 50 years, the characterisation of porous sound absorbing materials has been of increasing interest to both the acoustic engineers and customers. It is particularly important that acoustic engineers are able to predict the acoustical behaviour of these materials to get a quantitative measure of the acoustic energy absorption. This paper reviews the relevant literatures over this 50-year period and concludes that phenomenological models are currently the most accurate and suitable models of predicting the bulk acoustic properties in the whole audible frequency range. This review also presents the physical parameters which provide the link between the acoustical and material properties, as well as current experimental methods used to measure these parameters. Furthermore, the most common numerical methods for modelling porous materials are described