Multilayered graphene oxide impregnated polyurethane foam for ultimate sound absorbing performance: Algorithmic approach and experimental validation

A multilayered graphene oxide-impregnated polyurethane (GO-PU) foam structure is proposed to maximize the sound absorption coefficient (SAC). The sound absorption properties of each PU layer were controlled via GO impregnation. The optimal multilayered structure was derived via theoretical predictions using matrix calculations. The elastic porous materials theory of Bolton et al. was applied to theoretical modeling of the sound-absorbing materials. The developed routine predicted the SAC with high accuracy for single and multilayered designs. The impregnation effect of GO was enormous and improved the average SAC by up to 153 % compared with the original PU. It is encouraging that the average SAC was improved by up to 49 % by simply optimizing the layer arrangement with the same amount of GO impregnation. Notably, the average SAC above 500 Hz of the optimized 54.6-mm -thick (±0.4 mm) GO-PU multilayered structure was enhanced to over 0.9. These remarkable results were verified by theoretical calculations and experiments.