Sound diffuser made of acoustic metamaterial: numerical and experimental investigation

The use of metamaterials in room acoustics is becoming more and more popular. Their advantage is the possibility of adjusting the parameters of the systems in the desired frequency range and the reduction of dimensions compared to the existing solutions. This paper discusses the numerical design and experimental verification of sound diffuser based on the acoustic metamaterials: a slit with added quart-wave length resonator. The transfer matrix method is used to make a numerical model of the metamaterial cell, which was used to build a model of a diffuser composed of N = 7 cells. Then, the dimensions of the diffuser were optimized to obtain the sound diffusion in a wide frequency range. The sound dispersion coefficient was also calculated using the FEM method. The numerical results were compared with the measurements and it was shown that it is possible to make a broadband sound diffuser with the use of metamaterials.