Experimental study of targeted energy transfer from an acoustic system to a nonlinear membrane absorber

This paper deals with the application of the concept of targeted energy transfer to the field of acoustics, providing a new approach to passive sound control in the low frequency domain, where no efficient dissipative mechanism exists. The targeted energy transfer, also called energy pumping, is a phenomenon that we observe by combining a pure nonlinear oscillator with a linear primary system. It corresponds to an almost irreversible transfer of vibration energy from the linear system to the auxiliary nonlinear one, where the energy is finally dissipated. In this study, an experimental set-up has been developed using the air inside a tube as the acoustic linear system, a thin circular visco-elastic membrane as an essentially cubic oscillator and the air inside a box as a weak coupling between those two elements. In this paper, which mainly deals with experimental results, it is shown that several regimes exist under sinusoidal forcing, corresponding to the different nonlinear normal modes of the system. One of these regimes is the quasi-periodic energy pumping regime. The targeted energy transfer phenomenon is also visible on the free oscillations of the system. Indeed, above an initial excitation threshold, the sound extinction in the tube follows a quasi-linear decrease that is much faster than the usual exponential one. During this linear decrease, the energy of the acoustic medium is irreversibly transferred to the membrane and then damped into this element called nonlinear energy sink. We present also the frequency responses of the system which shows a clipping of the original resonance peak of the acoustic medium and we finally demonstrate the ability of the nonlinear absorber to operate in a large frequency band, tuning itself to any linear system.