Sensitivity analysis of vibro-acoustic systems in statistical energy analysis framework

The main objective of this paper is to present first and second-order sensitivity analysis of vibro-acoustic systems in the statistical energy analysis (SEA) frame work. Equations for computing these sensitivities for a general SEA model are obtained from two different approaches: (1) direct method and (2) adjoint method. The above equations are applied to a simple model of three plates, joined in the form of a 'Z', to minimize the total energy of one of the plates. It has been verified that these approaches lead to the same results and the difference between them is only with respect to the computational efficiency. The design sensitivity results calculated from the proposed analytical methods are compared with those obtained from the finite difference method, which show good agreement. The results of this paper can be useful to optimization of vibro-acoustic systems at the drawing board stage in the SEA framework.