Archives of Acoustics

Biography and scientific achievements of Professors Marianna Sankiewicz-Budzyński and Gustaw K.E. Budzyński - Founders of the Polish Audio Engineering.

Detection and identification of toxic environmental gases have assumed paramount importance precisely in the defense, industrial and civilian security sector. Numerous methods have been developed for the sensing of toxic gases in the environment ever since surface acoustic wave (SAW) technology came into existence. Such SAW sensors called electronic nose (E-Nose) sensor use the frequency response of a delay line/resonator. SAW device is focused and given importance. The selective coating between input and output interdigital transducers (IDTs) in the SAW device is responsible for corresponding changes in operating frequency of the device for a specific gas/vapour absorbed from the environment. A suitable combination of well-designed SAW delay lines with selective coatings not only help to improve sensor sensitivity and selectivity but also leads to the minimization of false frequency alarms in the E-Nose sensor. This article presents a comprehensive review of design, development, simulation and modelling of a SAW sensor for potential sensing of toxic environmental gases.

Nowadays, resonators are widely used in automobile, industrial applications, aerospace engineering, and some other fields. One of the unique characteristics of resonators which made them highly convenient is their acoustic capability to attenuate noise without having to use any acoustic absorptive material. The device acts by manipulating the sound waves to create mismatch impedance. Recent studies also suggest that the typical bulk size resonator with narrow frequency bandwidth is not the only option anymore, since there are newly designed resonators that are capable of having wide attenuation bandwidth and are smaller in size. Numerical and experimental measures were executed accordingly with the same purpose to obtain efficient noise attenuation results from varying resonators’ and mufflers’ configuration in terms of quantity, types, and geometry. The aim of this review is to summarize recent developments on resonator study and to try highlighting some noteworthy issues that need to be unraveled by future research. Helmholtz resonator, Quarter wave tube, Herschel-Quincke tube and helicoidal resonator are part of the numerous resonator studies that will be covered in this paper.

Five models and methodology are discussed in this paper for constructing classifiers capable of recognizing in real time the type of fuel injected into a diesel engine cylinder to accuracy acceptable in practical technical applications. Experimental research was carried out on the dynamic engine test facility. The signal of in-cylinder and in-injection line pressure in an internal combustion engine powered by mineral fuel, biodiesel or blends of these two fuel types was evaluated using the vibro-acoustic method. Computational intelligence methods such as classification trees, particle swarm optimization and random forest were applied.

Noise control has gained a lot of attention recently. However, presence of nonlinearities in signal paths for some applications can cause significant difficulties in the operation of control algorithms. In particular, this problem is common in structural noise control, which uses a piezoelectric shunt circuit. Not only vibrating structures may exhibit nonlinear characteristics, but also piezoelectric actuators. In this paper, active device casing is addressed. The objective is to minimize the noise coming out of the casing, by controlling vibration of its walls. The shunt technology is applied. The proposed control algorithm is based on algorithms from a group of soft computing. It is verified by means of simulations using data acquired from a real object.

Considering the environmental pollution caused by waste rubber, some measures should be taken to improve the utilization rate of waste rubber. In this study, the effect of Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) particles in the polyurethane (PU) foams on sound absorption behavior is investigated for improving sound environment within vehicles and reducing the environment pollution. EPDM of different contents and hardness are used as fillers for producing foams with different pore morphologies and sound absorption properties. The results show adds EPDM to foam would produce smaller pores, higher density and bigger air-flow resistivity. Simultaneously, there are better sound absorption properties of the PU foam composites in the medium frequency region and the better value can be obtained at the lower frequency with the content of EPDM increasing. The hardness of EPDM also shows better influence on sound absorption properties, especially in the medium frequency region. It means the foam pore morphologies have influence on sound absorption properties.

Most of sound sources are complex vibroacoustic objects consist of numerous elements. Some coupled vibrating plates of different shapes and sizes can be easily found in urban environments. The main aim of this study is to determine the sound radiation of coupled plates system of practical importance. The investigated vibroacoustic system consist of a thin circular plate coupled with a thick flat baffle with a circular hole. The circular plate has been mounted to the baffle’s hole using screws and two steel rings. The measurement setup was located inside a semi-anechoic chamber to assure the free field conditions. It was necessary to take into account the whole system surface to obtain the radiation efficiency based on the Hashimoto’s method. Such an approach can be troublesome and time-consuming. Therefore, the criterion has been proposed which allows the vibration velocity measurements and calculations to be performed only for the thin plate’s area. An alternative approach has been proposed based on the classical Rayleigh integral formula. Its advantage is a simpler implementation in a computer code. The obtained results have been compared with the theoretical results obtained for the elastically supported circular plate. A good agreement has been obtained at low frequencies.

To design breast ultrasound scanning systems or to test new imaging methods, various computer models are used to simulate the acoustic wave field propagation through a breast. The computer models vary in complexity depending on the applied approximations. The objective of this paper is to investigate how the applied approximations affect the resulting wave field. In particular, we investigate the importance of taking three-dimensional (3-D) spatial variations in the compressibility, volume density of mass, and attenuation into account. In addition, we compare four 3-D solution methods: a full-wave method, a Born approximation method, a parabolic approximation method, and a ray-based method. Results show that, for frequencies below 1 MHz, the amplitude of the fields scattering off the compressibility or density contrasts are at least 24 dB higher than the amplitude of the fields scattering off the attenuation contrasts. The results also show that considering only speed of sound as a contrast is a valid approximation. In addition, it is shown that the pressure field modeled with the full-wave method is more accurate than the fields modeled using the other three methods. Finally, the accuracy of the full-wave method is location independent whereas the accuracy of the other methods strongly depends on the point of observation.

Commercially available cardiac scanners use 64–128 elements phased-array (PA) probes and classical delay-and-sum beamforming to reconstruct a sector B-mode image. For portable and hand-held scanners, which are the fastest growing market, channel count reduction can greatly decrease the total power and cost of devices. The introduction of ultra-fast imaging methods based on plane waves and diverging waves provides new insight into heart’s moving structures and enables the implementation of new myocardial assessment and advanced flow estimation methods, thanks to much higher frame rates. The goal of this study was to show the feasibility of reducing the channel count in the diverging wave synthetic aperture image reconstruction method for phased-arrays. The application of ultra-fast 32-channel subaperture imaging combined with spatial compounding allowed the frame rate of approximately 400 fps for 120 mm visualization to be achieved with image quality obtained on par with the classical 64-channel beamformer. Specifically, it was shown that the proposed method resulted in image quality metrics (lateral resolution, contrast and contrast-to-noise ratio), for a visualization depth not exceeding 50 mm, that were comparable with the classical PA beamforming. For larger visualization depths (80–100 mm) a slight degradation of the above parameters was observed. In conclusion, diverging wave phased-array imaging with reduced number of channels is a promising technology for low-cost, energy efficient hand-held cardiac scanners.

Quantitative ultrasound has been widely used for tissue characterization. In this paper we propose a new approach for tissue compression assessment. The proposed method employs the relation between the tissue scatterers’ local spatial distribution and the resulting frequency power spectrum of the backscattered ultrasonic signal. We show that due to spatial distribution of the scatterers, the power spectrum exhibits characteristic variations. These variations can be extracted using the empirical mode decomposition and analyzed. Validation of our approach is performed by simulations and in-vitro experiments using a tissue sample under compression. The scatterers in the compressed tissue sample approach each other and consequently, the power spectrum of the backscattered signal is modified. We present how to assess this phenomenon with our method. The proposed in this paper approach is general and may provide useful information on tissue scattering properties.

This paper presents and analyses the results of a simulation of the acoustic field distribution in sectors of a 1024-element ring array, intended for the diagnosis of female breast tissue with the use of ultrasonic tomography. The array was tested for the possibility to equip an ultrasonic tomograph with an additional modality - conventional ultrasonic imaging with the use of individual fragments (sections) of the ring array. To determine the acoustic field for sectors of the ring array with a varying number of activated ultrasonic transducers, a combined sum of all acoustic fields created by each elementary transducer was calculated. By the use of MATLAB software, a unique algorithm was developed, for a numerical determination of the distribution of pressure of an ultrasonic wave on any surface or area of the medium generated by the concave curvilinear structure of rectangular ultrasound transducers with a geometric focus of the beam. The analysis of the obtained results of the acoustic field distribution inside the ultrasonic ring array used in tomography allows to conclude that the optimal number of transducers in a sector enabling to obtain ultrasound images using linear echographic scanning is 32 ≤ n ≤ 128, taking into account that due to an increased temporal resolution of ultrasonic imaging, this number should be as low as possible.

This paper proposes a comprehensive study on machine listening for localisation of snore sound excitation. Here we investigate the effects of varied frame sizes, and overlap of the analysed audio chunk for extracting low-level descriptors. In addition, we explore the performance of each kind of feature when it is fed into varied classifier models, including support vector machines, k-nearest neighbours, linear discriminant analysis, random forests, extreme learning machines, kernel-based extreme learning machines, multilayer perceptrons, and deep neural networks. Experimental results demonstrate that, wavelet packet transform energy can outperform most other features. A deep neural network trained with subband energy ratios reaches the highest performance achieving an unweighted average recall of 72.8% from four types for snoring.

Noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) as one of the major avoidable occupational related health issues has been studied for decades. To assess NIHL, the excitation pattern (EP) has been considered as one of the mechanisms to estimate the movements of the basilar membrane (BM) in the cochlea. In this study, two auditory filters, dual resonance nonlinear (DRNL) filter and rounded-exponential (ROEX) filter are applied to create two EPs, the velocity EP and the loudness EP respectively. Two noise hazard metrics are proposed based on two proposed EPs to evaluate hazardous levels caused by different types of noise. Moreover Gaussian noise and tone signals are simulated to evaluate performances of the proposed EPs and the noise metrics. The results show that both EPs can reflect the responses of the BM to different types of noise. For Gaussian noise there is a frequency shift between the velocity EP and the loudness EP. The results suggest that both EPs can be used for assessment of NIHL.

Ultrasonic pulse echo technique was used to study cupric oxide (CuO) thin films. CuO thin films were prepared using sol gel technique. They were doped with Lithium (Li) (1%, 2% and 4%).

Thin films’ thickness (d) and band gap energy (Eg) were measured. In addition, elastic moduli (longitudinal (L), shear (G), bulk (K) and Young’s (E)) and Poisson’s ratio (v) were determined to estimate the microstructure properties of the prepared films.

The study ameliorated the used transducers to overcome their dead zone and beam scattering; wedges were developed. The results showed the effectiveness of these wedges. They enhanced transducers’ sensitivity by changing the dead zone, beam diameter, beam directivity and waves’ transmission.

Also, the study noted that Li doping caused the improvement of CuO thin films to be more useful in solar cell fabrication. Li-CuO thin films had narrower band gap. Thus, they acquired a high quantum yield for the excited carriers; also they gained more efficiency to absorb solar light.

Diagnostics and decomposition of atmospheric disturbances in a planar flow are considered in this work. The study examines a situation in which the stationary equilibrium temperature of a gas may depend on the vertical coordinate due to external forces. The relations connecting perturbations are analytically established. These perturbations specify acoustic and entropy modes in an arbitrary stratified gas affected by a constant mass force. The diagnostic relations link acoustic and entropy modes, and are independent of time. Hence, they provide an ability to decompose the total vector of perturbations into acoustic and non-acoustic (entropy) parts, and to establish the distribution of energy between the sound and entropy modes, uniquely at any instant. The total energy of a flow is hence determined in its parts which are connected with acoustic and entropy modes. The examples presented in this work consider the equilibrium temperature of a gas, which linearly depends on the vertical coordinate. Individual profiles of acoustic and entropy parts for some impulses are illustrated with plots.

The paper presents a comparative study of music features derived from audio recordings, i.e. the same music pieces but representing different music genres, excerpts performed by different musicians, and songs performed by a musician, whose style evolved over time. Firstly, the origin and the background of the division of music genres were shortly presented. Then, several objective parameters of an audio signal were recalled that have an easy interpretation in the context of perceptual relevance. Within the study parameter values were extracted from music excerpts, gathered and compared to determine to what extent they are similar within the songs of the same performer or samples representing the same piece.

In order to enhance the acoustical performance of a traditional straight-path automobile muffler, a multi-chamber muffler having reverse paths is presented. Here, the muffler is composed of two internally parallel/extended tubes and one internally extended outlet. In addition, to prevent noise transmission from the muffler’s casing, the muffler’s shell is also lined with sound absorbing material. Because the geometry of an automotive muffler is complicated, using an analytic method to predict a muffler’s acoustical performance is difficult; therefore, COMSOL, a finite element analysis software, is adopted to estimate the automotive muffler’s sound transmission loss. However, optimizing the shape of a complicated muffler using an optimizer linked to the Finite Element Method (FEM) is time-consuming. Therefore, in order to facilitate the muffler’s optimization, a simplified mathematical model used as an objective function (or fitness function) during the optimization process is presented. Here, the objective function can be established by using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in conjunction with the muffler’s design parameters and related TLs (simulated by FEM). With this, the muffler’s optimization can proceed by linking the objective function to an optimizer, a Genetic Algorithm (GA). Consequently, the discharged muffler which is optimally shaped will improve the automotive exhaust noise.

A questionnaire survey was conducted in the residential quarters of Guangzhou, for which 582 elderly people over 60 years old were randomly recruited. The hearing impairment of the participants was evaluated using the Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly (HHIE), The participants’ subjective responses to the acoustical environment of their living place and the impact of the living acoustical environment (LAE) on the participants were investigated. The results show that the participants with a low HHIE score and no hearing impairment evaluated their LAE more favourably, and they considered that the effect of the LAE on their daily life was weak. However, those with a high HHIE score and severe hearing impairment evaluated their LAE poorly, and considered its effect on their daily lives to be significant. For the elderly, the worse the hearing is, the higher their demand for a better LAE. Traffic, construction, residential quarters, and noise from next door or upstairs neighbours were the main noise sources in the elderly’s living places, and traffic noise, construction noise, and noise from next door and upstairs were the most influential sources. 28.9% of the respondents had trouble hearing what their family said in their living place. The elderly without hearing impairment considered that continuous noise was the main reason that they could not hear what their family said in their living place, while those with hearing impairment believed that their own hearing problem was a contributing factor.

IIn this short communication, we revise a correlation for the saturated liquid isothermal compressibility based on the data available in DIPPR (Postnikov, 2016) which considers the molecular non-sphericity and addresses a problem of predicting speeds of sound in saturated long-chained alkanes. In addition, we correct a misprint appeared in the cited work and provide programming code used for the realisation of the proposed calculations.

Biography and scientific achievements of Academician Leonid Maksimovich Brekhovskikh - Russian physicist, the founder of the scientific school of Ocean Acoustics, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics Sciences, Professor, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The paper contains the abstracts of papers presented during JOINT CONFERENCE – ACOUSTICS 2018, Ustka, Poland, September 11 – 14, 2018 :

65th Open Seminar on Acoustics

35th Symposium on Hydroacoustics

Polish-German Structured Conference on Acoustics