Uncertainty quantification for locally resonant coated plates and shells

Abstract

The effect of uncertainty in design parameters on the acoustic performance of coated plates and coated shells for maritime applications is presented. The locally resonant coatings are designed using a viscoelastic material with an impedance similar to water and embedded with layers of inclusions. Both voids and hard inclusions, which respectively exhibit monopole and dipole resonance scattering, are considered. Effective medium approximation theory is employed to characterise the layers of inclusions as homogenised layers with effective material and geometric properties. The coating is then modelled as a multilayered equivalent fluid composed of alternating layers of the homogeneous viscoelastic material and the homogenised layers of inclusions. The coating is bonded to a rigid backing plate and the acoustic response is calculated using the transfer matrix method. The coating is also externally applied to an elastic cylindrical shell. The acoustic response is calculated by expressing the shell displacements and acoustic pressures in the coating and exterior domain in terms of Fourier series expansions, and applying continuity equations at each interface between the shell surface, coating layers and the surrounding water. Efficient stochastic models based on the non-intrusive polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) method are developed by transforming the analytical models for the coated plates and shells into computationally efficient surrogate models using point collocation. Uncertainty in dominant design parameters associated with the geometry of the inclusions and material properties of the coating is examined. The influence of the design parameters for inclusions tuned to different resonance frequencies and for multiple layers of inclusions is also reported. Strong acoustic performance of coating designs occurs in a broad frequency range around local resonance of the inclusions. For all coating models, uncertainty in parameters which predominantly influence the local resonance of the inclusions were observed to yield the greatest variation in the acoustic responses of the coated plates and shells.