Numerical study of acoustic metamaterial made of Helmholtz resonators with complex necks for low frequencies noise attenuation

In this paper, an acoustic metamaterial consisting of Helmholtz resonators with complex necks is proposed for low frequency noise reduction. The resonators are made of a cavity and a complex neck, which is a periodic succession of necks with small and large diameters. The acoustic attenuation performance of the proposed metamaterial design is demonstrated using finite element method. For such a shaped neck, the sound absorption coefficient presents multiple peaks. With a succession of N small and (N - 1) large neck diameters, N peaks in the sound absorption coefficient are obtained. By increasing the number of successions, the number of peaks increases. At the peaks, the surface acoustic impedance of the metamaterial nearly matches with the characteristic impedance of the air. This makes the sound absorption coefficient being nearly 100%. Keeping the same cavity volume, we increase the number of sound absorption peaks by the complex shape of the neck, while the classic Helmholtz resonator presents only one peak.