Optimizing material properties of composite plates for sound transmission problem

To calculate the specific transmission loss (TL) of a composite plate, the conjugate gradient optimization method is utilized to estimate and optimize material properties of the composite plate in this study. For an n-layer composite plate, a nonlinear dynamic stiffness matrix based on the thick plate theory is formulated. To avoid huge computational efforts due to the combination of different composite material plates, a transfer matrix approach is proposed to restrict the dynamic stiffness matrix of the composite plate to a 4 x 4 matrix. Moreover, the transfer matrix approach has also been used to simplify the complexity of the objective function gradient for the optimization method. Numerical simulations are performed to validate the present algorithm by comparing the TL of the optimal composite plate with that of the original plate. Small number of iterations required during convergence tests illustrates the efficiency of the optimization method. The results indicate that an excellent estimation for the composite plate can be obtained for the desired sound transmission. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.