Active vibration control for a smart panel with enhanced acoustic performances

The spread of smart structures has recorded a significant increase during the last decades. Nowadays these solutions are applied in various fields such as aerospace, automotive and civil constructions. This kind of structures was born in the past in order to cope with the high vibrations that every lightweight structure has to face. In order to reduce weight designers usually decide to use very thin and lightweight structures. In the automotive field, for example, a reduced fuel consumption is obtained employing lightweight materials. However, in general a worsening of the vibroacoustic comfort is obtained with undesired vibrations that can be really annoying for passengers and dangerous for the structure itself. This work presents an innovative smart plate that is able to actively vary its dynamic properties, by means of an IMSC control logic, in order to improve the acoustic performances. An investigation about the system response in the high frequency range allowed to assess the behavior in terms of absorption, reflection coefficient and transmission loss.