Structural-Acoustic Optimization

The effort to optimize structures for better acoustic properties is one of the major challenges of our time. Improvement of hardware systems and simulation methods has encouraged researchers to employ methods of numerical optimization for structural-acoustic optimization over the last 25 years. The chapter starts with a brief survey of structural acoustic optimization. This is followed by a detailed review of applications of structural-acoustic optimization. It describes the applications, and also discusses the parameters, constraints, and objective functions which have been reported in literature. The chapter highlights the structural and acoustic analysis techniques including fluid-structure interaction and optimization methods. This is followed by a discussion of special techniques including techniques for efficient sensitivity analysis, efficient reanalysis, panel contribution analysis, and analysis over frequency ranges. The chapter ends with a case study on the optimization of a finite beam in two dimensions.