Pole identification method to extract the equivalent fluid characteristics of general sound-absorbing materials

Abstract

A method is presented to characterize general sound-absorbing materials through a pole-based identification of the equivalent fluid. This is accomplished by 1) determining the extended equivalent fluid of the material sample through the transfer function method (TFM), 2) identification of the acoustic response of the material through the poles of the extended effective density and compressibility, and 3) build the effective density and compressibility from the poles associated to the local acoustic response. Real pole pairs describe a dissipative medium (or equivalently an over-damped resonating medium), which is the natural behavior of rigid-frame porous materials, while complex-conjugate pole pairs describe a locally-resonant medium typical of metamaterials. Complex-conjugate poles associated to elastic resonances of the sample are discarded. We test the method for several non-conventional porous materials. In general, a better fit to the measured surface impedance is obtained than with an acoustics-based identification to the Johnson-Champoux-Allard-Pride-Lafarge model (JCAPL), and the method appears also to be robust to errors of the TFM.