Analysis of propagation characteristics of flexural wave in honeycomb sandwich panel and design of loudspeaker for radiating inclined sound

A loudspeaker for an auditory guiding system is proposed. This loudspeaker utilizes inclined sound transformed from a flexural wave in a honeycomb sandwich panel. We focused on the fact that the inclined sound propagates extensively with uniform level and direction. Furthermore, sound can be generated without group delay dispersion because the phase velocity of the flexural wave in the sandwich panel becomes constant with increasing frequency. These characteristics can be useful for an auditory guiding system in public spaces since voice-guiding navigation indicates the right direction regardless of position on a pathway. To design the proposed loudspeaker, the behavior of the sandwich panel is predicted using a theoretical equation in which the honeycomb core is assumed as an orthotropic continuum. We calculated the phase velocity dispersion of the flexural wave in the sandwich panel and compared the results obtained using the equation with those of a simulation based on the finite element method and an experiment in order to confirm the applicability of the theoretical equation. It was confirmed that the phase velocities obtained using the theoretical equation and by the simulation were in good agreement with that obtained experimentally. The obtained results suggest that the behavior of the sandwich panel can be predicted using the parameters of the panel. In addition, we designed an optimized honeycomb sandwich panel for radiating inclined sound by calculating the phase velocity characteristics of various panels that have different parameters of core height and cell size using the theoretical equation. Sound radiation from the optimized panel was simulated and compared with that of a homogeneous plate. It was clear that the variance of the radiation angle with varying frequency of the optimized panel was smaller than that of the homogeneous plate. This characteristic of sound radiation with a uniform angle is useful for indicating the destination direction. On the basis of this fact, we established a design method of the flat-panel loudspeaker for generating inclined sound using a honeycomb sandwich panel.