Prediction of sound transmission loss of cylindrical acoustic enclosure using statistical energy analysis and its experimental validation

In the present work, the sound transmission through a cylindrical shape acoustic enclosure is predicted analytically and verified experimentally. An analytical model is developed, based on the statistical energy analysis (SEA) approach, to examine the transmission loss of a cylindrical acoustic enclosure in different frequency regions, including the low-, intermediate-, and high-frequency ranges. In the developed model, the nonresonant wave response is included in addition to consideration of the resonant response for obtaining more accurate results. It is demonstrated that the developed SEA formulation in this work can compute the resonant as well as the nonresonant sound transmission of the cylindrical acoustic enclosure separately. To validate the analytical model, an experimental setup was developed, and the sound transmission loss of a cylindrical acoustic enclosure was measured using the sound intensity experimental technique. It was found that the analytical results are in good agreement with the measured transmission loss, especially at the panel ring and critical frequencies. The results obtained indicate that the proposed analytical model is efficient to predict the sound transmission loss of cylindrical acoustic enclosures.