Vibration and acoustic radiation characteristics of simply supported curved plate in thermal environment

The thermal environment has a tremendous impact on many properties of wall panel structures. To study the vibration and acoustic properties of curved panels in the thermal environment, a theoretical model of a simply supported curved plate structure in a temperature gradient is investigated in this study by using a modal superposition method based on the Donnell shell theories and combined with a temperature field analysis. Theoretical calculations of modal frequencies and radiated acoustic power in the presence of a temperature gradient are performed, and the results are found to be in good agreement with those obtained using finite element methods. At the modal frequencies, the variations of various orders with temperature gradient are considered, which shows that the temperature field strongly softens the lowest order modal frequency while temperature has the least effect on the (1, 1) order modal frequency. The minimum modal frequency tends to ripple down with increasing radius and opening angle; when the radius of curvature and opening angles are at appropriate design values, the minimum modal frequency will effectively improve. Finally, we analyze the acoustic radiation characteristics of the curved plate under point force load excitation and find that the radiated acoustic power and mean square velocity move to lower frequencies as the temperature increases. In addition, the acoustic radiation efficiency is small overall at low frequencies, but when temperature gradients are present, the amount of relative change is larger.