Macroscopic theory of sound propagation in rigid-framed porous materials allowing for spatial dispersion : principle and validation

This work is dedicated to present and validate a new and generalized macroscopic nonlocal theory of sound propagation in rigid-framed porous media saturated with a viscothermal fluid. This theory allows to go beyond the limits of the classical local theory and within the limits of linear theory, to take not only temporal dispersion, but also spatial dispersion into account. In the framework of the new approach, a homogenization procedure is proposed to upscale the dynamics of sound propagation from Navier-Stokes-Fourier scale to the volume-average scale, through solving two independent microscopic action-response problems. Contrary to the classical method of homogenization, there is no length-constraint to be considered alongside of the development of the new method, thus, there is no frequency limit for the medium effective properties to be valid. In absence of solid matrix, this procedure leads to Kirchhoff-Langevin’s dispersion equation for sound propagation in viscothermal fluids. The new theory and upscaling procedure are validated in three cases corresponding to three different periodic microgeometries of the porous structure. Employing a semi-analytical method in the simple case of cylindrical circular tubes filled with a viscothermal fluid, it is found that the wavenumbers and impedances predicted by nonlocal theory match with those of the long-known Kirchhoff’s exact solution, while the results by local theory (Zwikker and Kosten’s) yield only the wavenumber of the least attenuated mode, in addition, with a small discrepancy compared to Kirchhoff’s. In the case where the porous medium is made of a 2D square network of cylindrical solid inclusions, the frequency-dependent phase velocities of the least attenuated mode are computed based on the local and nonlocal approaches, by using direct Finite Element numerical simulations. The phase velocity of the least attenuated Bloch wave computed through a completely different quasi-exact multiple scattering method taking into account the viscothermal effects, shows a remarkable agreement with those obtained by the nonlocal theory in a wide frequency range. When the microgeometry is in the form of daisy chained Helmholtz resonators, using the upscaling procedure in nonlocal theory and a plane wave modelling lead to two effective density and bulk modulus functions in Fourier space. In the framework of the new upscaling procedure, Zwikker and Kosten’s equations governing the pressure and velocity fields’ dynamics averaged over the crosssections of the different parts of Helmholtz resonators, are employed in order to coarse-grain them to the scale of a periodic cell containing one resonator. The least attenuated wavenumber of the medium is obtained through a dispersion equation established via nonlocal theory, while an analytical modelling is performed, independently, to obtain the least attenuated Bloch mode propagating in the medium, in a frequency range where the resonance phenomena can be observed. The results corresponding to these two different methods show that not only the Bloch wave modelling, but also, especially, the modelling based on the new theory can describe the resonance phenomena originating from the spatial dispersion effects present in the macroscopic dynamics of the matarial.