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The four-microphone standing wave tube system has proven useful for measuring the absorption and transmission loss of various fibrous and non-fibrous absorbers. The system is fast, repeatable, accurate and compact. This paper discusses the advantages of the four-microphone system for measuring the transmission loss in lateral-flow absorber systems. The original four-microphone round impedance tube system and the migration to a four-microphone square tube system are discussed. The four-microphone square tube system allows effective study of filled and partially filled cavities.

The damping effect that is observed when a fibrous acoustical treatment is applied to a thin metal panel typical of automotive structures has been modeled by using three independent techniques. In the first two methods the fibrous treatment was modeled by using the limp frame formulation proposed by Bolton et al., while the third method makes use of a general poro-elastic model based on the Biot theory. All three methods have been found to provide consistent predictions that are in excellent agreement with one another. An examination of the numerical results shows that the structural damping effect results primarily from the suppression of the nearfield acoustical motion within the fibrous treatment, that motion being closely coupled with the vibration of the base panel. The observed damping effect is similar in magnitude to that provided by constrained layer dampers having the same mass per unit area as the fibrous layer.

In this paper, experimental evidence will be presented to demonstrate that unstiffened, low density fibrous materials are “limp”: i.e., their in vacuo bulk stiffness is very small compared to that of air with the result that the materials' solid phase motion becomes acoustically significant. Next, a new limp porous material model is presented. It is shown that this model may be used in conjunction with transfer matrices to predict the absorption or transmission loss of arbitrarily layered combinations of fibrous layers, permeable or impermeable membranes, and air spaces. The predictions of this model agree well with experimental measurements and so may be used to optimize sound absorption or transmission treatments.