Beranek's porous material model: Inspiration for advanced material analysis and design

Abstract

In 1942, Leo Beranek presented a model for predicting the acoustic properties of porous materials [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 13, 248 (1942)]. Since then, research into many types of porous materials has grown into a broad field. In addition to Beranek's model, many other models for predicting the acoustic properties of porous materials in terms of key physical material parameters have been developed. Following a brief historical review, this work concentrates on studying porous materials and microperforated panels—pioneered by one of Beranek's early friends and fellow students, Dah-You Maa. Utilizing equivalent fluid models, porous material and microperforated panel theories have recently been unified. In this work, the Bayesian inference framework is applied to single- and multilayered porous and microperforated materials. Bayesian model selection and parameter estimation are used to guide the analysis and design of innovative multilayer acoustic absorbers.