Light-weight large-scale tunable metamaterial panel for low-frequency sound insulation

Abstract To overcome the traditional problem of blocking low-frequency noise, this letter proposes a design of large-scale metamaterial panel with periodic tunable resonant cell arrays. Numerical calculations show that the tunable metamaterial panels exhibit multiple local resonance mechanisms, which result in sound transmission loss (STL) improvements over traditional mass law in low-frequency regions. The effective dynamic mass density and the tunability of sound insulation performance are further examined. Moreover, large-scale tunable metamaterial panel samples with 36 (6 × 6) unit cells are fabricated. And experimental measurements of sound insulation performance are conducted to validate the theoretical predictions.