Investigation on sound absorption properties of aerogel/polymer nonwovens

This paper presents an investigation on sound absorption performance of aerogel/polymer nonwoven fabrics. Polyester/polyethylene nonwovens embedded with hydrophobic amorphous silica aerogel were chosen for sound absorption measurements. The sound absorption coefficient (SAC) of single and laminated layers of aerogel nonwovens blankets was tested by Brüel and Kjær impedance tube, the noise reduction coefficient (NRC) was used for numerical analysis. A sound absorption index was developed to analyze the effect of aerogel content on sound absorption ability. The effect of air-back cavities on SAC of single-layer aerogel/polymer nonwoven fabrics was investigated. The results show that there is a decrease in SAC with the increase of aerogel content. It is observed that the NRC linearly increased with the increase of layers for all the samples. It was also found that the air-back cavities result in resonance phenomenon, as the increase in thickness of air-back cavities the peak values of SAC shift toward lower frequencies.