Acoustic Metamaterials Block 94% of Sound

Ghaffarivardavagh and Zhang let mathematics—a shared passion that has buoyed both of their engineering careers and made them well-suited research partners—guide them toward a workable design for what the acoustic metamaterial would look like.

“Sound is made by very tiny disturbances in the air. So, our goal is to silence those tiny vibrations,” Ghaffarivardavagh and Zhang say. “If we want the inside of a structure to be open air, then we have to keep in mind that this will be the pathway through which sound travels.”

They calculated the dimensions and specifications that the metamaterial would need to have in order to interfere with the transmitted sound waves, preventing sound—but not air—from being radiated through the open structure. The basic premise is that the metamaterial needs to be shaped in such a way that it sends incoming sounds back to where they came from, they say.

On one end of the pipe, a loudspeaker blasts a noise. On the other end, the open acoustic silencing metamaterial redirects the sound as long as it’s fitted in place. 

As a test case, they decided to create a structure that could silence sound from a loudspeaker. Based on their calculations, they modeled the physical dimensions that would most effectively silence noises. Bringing those models to life, they used 3D printing to materialize an open, noise-canceling structure made of plastic.

Trying it out in the lab, the researchers sealed the loudspeaker into one end of a PVC pipe. On the other end, the tailor-made acoustic metamaterial was fastened into the opening. With the hit of the play button, the experimental loudspeaker set-up came oh-so-quietly to life in the lab. Standing in the room, based on your sense of hearing alone, you’d never know that the loudspeaker was blasting an irritatingly high-pitched note. If, however, you peered into the PVC pipe, you would see the loudspeaker’s subwoofers thrumming away.

The metamaterial, ringing around the internal perimeter of the pipe’s mouth, worked like a mute button incarnate until the moment when Ghaffarivardavagh reached down and pulled it free. The lab suddenly echoed with the screeching of the loudspeaker’s tune.

“The moment we first placed and removed the silencer…was literally night and day,” says Jacob Nikolajczyk, who in addition to being a study coauthor and former undergraduate researcher in Zhang’s lab is a passionate vocal performer. “We had been seeing these sorts of results in our computer modeling for months—but it is one thing to see modeled sound pressure levels on a computer, and another to hear its impact yourself.”

By comparing sound levels with and without the metamaterial fastened in place, the team found that they could silence nearly all—94 percent to be exact—of the noise, making the sounds emanating from the loudspeaker imperceptible to the human ear.
A quieter world

Now that their prototype has proved so effective, the researchers have some big ideas about how their acoustic-silencing metamaterial could go to work making the real world quieter.

“Drones are a very hot topic,” Zhang says. Companies like Amazon are interested in using drones to deliver goods, she says, and “people are complaining about the potential noise.”

“The culprit is the upward-moving fan motion,” Ghaffarivardavagh says. “If we can put sound-silencing open structures beneath the drone fans, we can cancel out the sound radiating toward the ground.”

The mathematically designed, 3D-printed acoustic metamaterial is shaped in such a way that it sends incoming sounds back to where they came from, Ghaffarivardavagh and Zhang say. Inside the outer ring, a helical pattern interferes with sounds, blocking them from transmitting through the open center while preserving air’s ability to flow through.
Photo by Cydney Scott

Closer to home—or the office—fans and HVAC systems could benefit from acoustic metamaterials that render them silent yet still enable hot or cold air to be circulated unencumbered throughout a building.

Ghaffarivardavagh and Zhang also point to the unsightliness of the sound barriers used today to reduce noise pollution from traffic and see room for an aesthetic upgrade. “Our structure is super lightweight, open, and beautiful. Each piece could be used as a tile or brick to scale up and build a sound-canceling, permeable wall,” they say.

The shape of acoustic-silencing metamaterials, based on their method, is also completely customizable, Ghaffarivardavagh says. The outer part doesn’t need to be a round ring shape in order to function.

“We can design the outer shape as a cube or hexagon, anything really,” he says. “When we want to create a wall, we will go to a hexagonal shape” that can fit together like an open-air honeycomb structure.

Such walls could help contain many types of noises. Even those from the intense vibrations of an MRI machine, Zhang says.

According to Stephan Anderson, a professor of radiology at BU School of Medicine and a coauthor of the study, the acoustic metamaterial could potentially be scaled “to fit inside the central bore of an MRI machine,” shielding patients from the sound during the imaging process.

Zhang says the possibilities are endless, since the noise mitigation method can be customized to suit nearly any environment: “The idea is that we can now mathematically design an object that can block the sounds of anything,” she says.

This work was supported by a Boston University Materials Innovation Grant and Dean’s Catalyst Award.

Get Paid to Expose the Fake News! https://tinyurl.com/y2rodxfg

Support BeforeitsNews by trying APeX (far superior to colloidal silver) or any of our other great products at www.mitocopper.com

Check out the life changing BeforeitsNews natural health products and sign up to be an Affiliate so you earn on all sales through your links on Beforeitsnews, other websites or social networks!

APeX – Far superior to colloidal silver in destroying viruses, bacteria and other pathogens. See the videos and 50 page report!

Ultimate Curcumin – Most powerful natural pain relief you can buy. Reduce inflammation, depression, arthritis and so much more!

Supreme Fulvic – Nature’s most important supplement! Read our amazing testimonials and experience vivid dreams again!

MitoCopper – First bioavailable copper cleans up your blood from pathogens and gives you more energy! Watch all videos on our website

Use code Alton777 for a 10% discount on products

Contacts and sources:
Kat J. McAlpine
Boston University

Citation: Ultra-open acoustic metamaterial silencer based on Fano-like interference
Reza Ghaffarivardavagh, Jacob Nikolajczyk, Stephan Anderson, Xin Zhang.. Physical Review B, 2019; 99 (2) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.99.024302