A tunable, light-weight and compact silencer

All rights reserved. A tunable, light weight and compact silencer using dielectric elastomer acoustic metamaterials (DEAMs) is investigated in this study. We propose a light-weight and compact acoustic silencer design formed of arrays of acoustic resonators by employing various pre-stretched dielectric elastomer (DE) membranes with conductive electrodes, central platelets and compact back cavities for achieving tunable and broadband acoustic property in the low frequency ranges. The acoustic performance of the proposed device in terms of transmission loss (TL) is experimentally characterized and analyzed. The resulted TL can be tuned by varying the applied voltages to the DE membranes showing promising potentials as adaptive and light-weight sound control devices for suppressing the targeted propeller noises on a multi-rotor MAV within a compact space and other aeronautical engineering applications.