Microperforated panel absorbers (MPPA) are acoustic absorbers that consists of a perforated panel fitted in front of a rigid wall and air cavity. The absorption frequency range of MPPA is limited in the vicinity of the resonance frequencies due to the sound absorption mechanism. There have been researches to widen the absorption frequency range of MPPA, however, the approaches increase the volume of the whole absorber. It is important to minimize the volume of the absorber while widening the absorption frequency range. In this study, multi-objective design optimization of the MPPA for widening the bandwidth of the sound absorption and minimizing the volume is performed. The normal sound absorption coefficient of double layer MPPA is evaluated by the transfer matrix method, and sequential approximate optimization (SAO) using radial basis function (RBF) network is adopted to identify the trade-off relationship between the broadband sound absorption and the volume. The experiment is conducted to examine the validity of the proposed approach.
Tabuchi et al. (Wed,) studied this question.