Acoustic Topology Optimization for Vibroacoustics Applications

Acoustic topology optimization is one of the most interesting new technologies in vibroacoustics, and is a powerful tool that enables engineers to find optimal solutions to problems related to their applications. In this article, several acoustic topology optimization examples are shown.

- René Christensen

Engineering is to a large degree the combined output of education and experience. If you are designing transducers, you need academic knowledge about acoustics, e lectronics , transductance principles, modeling and so on, but you also partly rely on the experience you have accumulated of a more experimental and empirical kind and you use solution strategies from previous projects to solve the problems at hand.

Oftentimes, however, the combination of academic and experimental knowledge is not enough to clear a direct path toward a product or to solve a problem in a straightforward manner. That can be the case when there are many degrees of freedom, i.e., parameters that can be changed in a system and when several targets are sought at once. In such cases, changing one parameter at a time will not be feasible for finding an optimal solution, as the optimum value of one parameter will depend on several or all of the other parameters. A trial-and-error approach could then be used, but that can cause new issues, as you can easily end up spending a lot of time without getting any closer to a solution. More systematic approaches such as Design of Experiments (DOE) [1] may be helpful if the number of parameters is limited, but many design problems have so many design variables that a simple combinatorics analysis will show that it could literally take years to explore the full solution spaces, even when using simulations instead of experiments.