The treatment and management of waste in industrial processes remain a challenge, especially in material-intensive industries. In an attempt to mitigate this issue, sustainable architectural solutions focus extensively on the reuse of post-consumer waste in a bid to minimize environmental degradation. In this work, we propose a new acoustic metamaterial composed of three layers of reclaimed PVC diaphragms and a structured honeycomb core. The diaphragms were implemented on a hard frame in a manner that incorporates air gaps between layers and were tested using a portable impedance tube for setups including honeycomb panels behind diaphragms, in addition to setups including only air gaps, compared to diaphragms alone. The experimental and simulated results, using a transfer matrix approach, show a significantly improved low-frequency sound absorption performance within the 250–600 Hz band.
Ciaburro et al. (Sat,) studied this question.