Sound absorption performance and mechanism of flexible PVA microperforated membrane

Abstract A flexible micro-perforated material was fabricated for acoustic application in this study, which is different from the traditional perforated material whose general impression is rigid, dense and inflexible. The raw material is polyvinyl alcohol and develop into PVA nanofiber membranes by electrospinning. On this basis, flexible PVA micro-perforated membranes were fabricated through punching process. The structure combined nanofiber, porous material and perforated panel in an organic whole. And the effects of perforation rate, perforation diameter and cavity distance on the acoustic performance were studied in light of the experimental result. The acoustic-electric analogy model of the micro-perforated sound absorber was used for theoretical calculation and compared with the corresponding experimental results. As we studied, the flexible microperforated material had favorable sound absorption performance both in low and high frequency, which was a significant improvement over traditional perforated plate. Besides, the broadband sound absorption could be obtained with the properly selection and optimization of the structural parameters. These latent qualities of the flexible PVA micro-perforated membrane make it ideal for use in the noise reduction field as a flexible and lightweight acoustic material.