Abstract

Vibrating plates may become strong sources of unwanted sound exposing humans to high levels of noise, particularly at low frequencies. Therefore, knowledge of the sound radiation of vibrating plates is very important for noise control engineering. This paper presents a method to estimate the sound power radiated from a baffled vibrating plate. Instead of using a modal radiation approach, the sound power is expressed in terms of volume velocities of a number of elemental radiators by dividing the vibrating surface into small virtual elements. Thus, the method discussed here is based on theradiation resistance matrix where its entries are calculated by treating each element as a circular piston having an area equal of that of the corresponding element. As practical examples, the method is applied to estimate the sound radiation from guided annular and rectangular plates. Numerical results indicate the accuracy and efficiency of the numerical technique.