Long Elastic Open Neck Acoustic Resonator for low frequency absorption

Passive acoustic liners, used in aeronautic engine nacelles to reduce radiated fan noise, have a quarter-wavelength behavior, because of perforated sheets backed by honeycombs (with one or two degrees of freedom). However, their acoustic absorption ability is naturally limited to medium and high frequencies because of constraints in thickness. The low ratio "plate thickness/hole diameter" generates impedance levels dependent on the incident sound pressure level and the grazing mean flow (by a mechanism of nonlinear dissipation through vortex shedding), which penalises the optimal design of liners. The aim of this paper is to overcome this problem by a concept called LEONAR ("Long Elastic Open Neck Acoustic Resonator"), in which a perforated plate is coupled with tubes of variable lengths inserted in a limited volume of a back cavity. To do this, experimental and theoretical studies, using different types of liners (material nature, hole diameter, tube length, cavity thickness) are described in this paper. It is shown that the impedance can be precisely determined with an analytical approach based on parallel transfer matrices of tubes coupled to the cavity. Moreover, the introduction of tubes in a cavity of a conventional resonator generates a significant shift in the frequency range of absorption towards lower frequencies or allows a reduction of cavity thickness. The impedance is practically independent of sound pressure level because of a high ratio "tube length/tube hole diameter". Finally, a test led in an aeroacoustic bench suggests that a grazing flow at a bulk Mach number of 0.3 has little impact on the impedance value. These first results allow considering these resonators with linear behavior as an alternative to classical resonators, in particular, as needed for future Ultra High Bypass Ratio engines with shorter and thinner nacelles. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.