Tunable acoustic metamaterial with an array of resonators actuated by dielectric elastomer

Acoustic metamaterial comprising an array of resonators being attached to the side wall of a rigid duct is investigated in this study. We propose a resonator design by employing a pre-stretched dielectric elastomer (DE) membrane to tune the acoustic property of each resonator. Both numerical and experimental techniques are developed to characterize the acoustic behavior of the proposed device in terms of transmission loss (TL). By connecting multiple resonators, we show that a broadband TL can be achieved which combines the multiple attenuation bands provided by each resonator unit. The resulted attenuation band can be tuned by varying the applied voltage to the DE membranes, showing promising potentials such as adaptive sound control devices for ventilation systems and other engineering applications. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.