An automatic simulation pipeline for coupled simulations of acoustic damping materials

Abstract Foamed materials are widely used to reduce noise due to their comparably good acoustic damping behavior. However, out of a large variety of these materials a suitable candidate has to be identified for each application. This is a challenging process that is typically guided by experiments and experience. While numerical simulations could support these experiments and reduce the effort to a great extent, no suitable discretization approach has yet been established that can fully capture the complex geometry of the foam. A fully resolved model is desirable in order to yield reliable predictions that can then be used to establish homogenized models. We established a monolithic coupling approach based on the finite cell method (FCM) that realizes a vibroacoustic simulation in this sense. The fluid and the structure domain are discretized by Cartesian grids and the geometry defined based on computed tomography scans is accounted for during the quadrature of the weak form. Our simulation in the time domain makes use of explicit time marching schemes and is therefore limited by a critical time step size. This is known to be arbitrarily low for discretizations with the FCM containing cells with arbitrarily small support. As a remedy against this we use the classical ‐stabilization technique and investigate its potentials and limitations.