Active piezoelectric-structure acoustic control of a soft-core sandwich panel using volume velocity and a weighted sum of spatial gradient control metric

In this paper, the active control of sound transmission through a simply supported soft-core sandwich panel is analytically studied. Since, the sound transmission through soft-core sandwich panels in the low-frequency region mainly occurs due to flexural and dilatational modes, and therefore to control these structural modes, volume velocity and weighted sum of spatial gradients (WSSG) are used to drive a piezoceramic actuator (PZT) attached on the exterior side of the bottom face plate. Sound power level and voltage required to drive the PZT are compared for different values of isotropic core loss factor. Numerical studies indicate that both control metrics are capable of attenuating the flexural and the dilatational modes of the sandwich panel, and hence, reduce significant amount of sound power in a wider frequency range. By carefully selecting the modes to calculate the scaling factors, WSSG provides comparable control to volume velocity. However, the necessary voltage required to drive the PZT to minimize the WSSG is less as compared to minimize the volume velocity.