Minimizing the acoustic power radiated by a fluid-loaded curved panel excited by turbulent boundary layer flow

In order to address noise control problems in the design stage, structural-acoustic optimization procedures can be used to find the optimal design for reduced noise or vibration. However, most structural-acoustic optimization procedures are not general enough to include both heavy fluid loading and complex forcing functions. Additionally, it can be difficult to determine and assess trade-offs between weight and sound radiation. A structural-acoustic optimization approach is presented for minimizing the radiated power of structures with heavy fluid loading excited by complex forcing functions. The procedure is demonstrated on a curved underwater panel excited by a point drive and by turbulent boundary layer flow. To facilitate more efficient analysis, an uncorrelated pressure assumption is made for the turbulent boundary layer forcing function. The thicknesses of groups of elements were used as the design variables with an adaptive covariance matrix evolutionary strategy as the search algorithm. The objective function was a weighted sum of total sound power and panel mass and the Pareto front was computed to show the optimum trade-off between the two objectives. The optimal designs are presented which illustrate the best methods for reducing radiated sound and mass simultaneously.