Development of ventilation and sound-absorbing materials using specimens generated by the multi-objective optimization method

Abstract

In hot and humid tropical countries, the houses are designed to be naturally ventilated with vent louvers. However, these louvers play as direct paths for noise entering the house. It is necessary to create geometries that can maximize the noise transmission loss and the ventilation performance of the housing structure. The present study aims to develop ventilation and sound-absorbing material using the multi-objective optimization method. This material has a specific design that enables wind from the exterior of the building to pass through while reducing noise. This study is presented in two parts. This paper, Part 1, explains the multi-objective optimization method and analysis calculation result. In the following paper, Part 2, the acoustic experiment of the ABS specimens manufactured by the 3D printer and results will be reported. An optimization problem is formulated by the Digital Fourier transformation, which searches the patterns of existing and blank elements. The sum of the magnitudes of the flow velocities in all the elements and those in the bottom elements are obtained from fluid potential flow analysis and used as by-objective functions. Multi-objective optimization is performed using "Platypus," an external library of Python. As a result, models that maximized the sum of the magnitude of each flow velocities are obtained.