Abstract
Natural fiber-filled polymers offer good mechanical properties and economic competitiveness compared to traditional materials. Wood flour is one of the most widely used fillers, and the resulting material, known as wood plastic composite (WPC), has already found a wide applicability in many industrial sectors including automotive and building construction. This paper, as a followup of a previous study on a numerical-based approach to optimize the sound transmission loss of WPC panels, presents an extensive numerical and experimental vibro-acoustic analysis of an orthotropic panel made out of WPC boards. Both structural and acoustical excitations were considered. The panel radiation efficiency and its transmission loss were modeled using analytic and semi-analytic approaches. The mechanical properties of the structure, required as input data in the prediction models, were numerically determined in terms of wavenumbers by means of finite element simulations, and experimentally verified. The accuracy of the predicted acoustic performances was assessed by comparing the numerical results with the measured data. The comparisons highlighted a significant influence of the junctions between the WPC boards, especially on the panel’s transmission loss. The radiation efficiency results were mostly influenced by the boundary conditions of the plate-like structure. This latter aspect was further investigated through a finite element analysis.
Highlights
The building construction industry is responsible for a significant amount of CO2 global emissions and energy consumption
A first comparison was made between the wavenumbers evaluated from the finite element (FE) beam models, introduced in Section 2, and the experimental data measured on the wood plastic composite (WPC) plate, as described in the previous section
This paper presented a vibro-acoustic analysis of a WPC orthotropic panel, in which the predicted results were compared with measured data
Summary
The building construction industry is responsible for a significant amount of CO2 global emissions and energy consumption. Taking climate actions within this sector can be very effective, even though, as shown in the 2019 Global Status Report on buildings and construction [1], the final energy demand in buildings is still rising. The strategic actions that should be undertaken in order to pursue the decarbonization of the building and construction industry span from increasing the use of renewable energy sources, to installing more efficient heating, cooling, and ventilation systems, but it involves the development of innovative materials or bio-based solutions with a reduced impact on the environment. The use of thermal and acoustical insulating systems involving natural or recycled materials is only at an early stage and still limited, as depicted by the state-of-the-art published a few years ago [2]. As was shown in a Materials 2020, 13, 1897; doi:10.3390/ma13081897 www.mdpi.com/journal/materials
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