What is it about?
Architectural acoustic diffusers are used to treat aberrations in rooms such as echoes. They do this by dispersing sound. Add frosting to a mirror and the light reflection gets indistinct, add a diffuser to a wall and sound reflections become blurred. The paper outlines a new approach to producing a diffuser that draws upon findings in metamaterial physics. By exploited the slow-wave phenomenon, we can create a diffuser that is shallower than many conventional designs.
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Why is it important?
In architectural acoustics making a treatment shallower is usually better. It reduces the amount of the room taken up with treatments, and is more environmentally-friendly as it reduces the quantity of material needed. The design outlined in the paper could be made by extrusion.
Perspectives
I was lucky to have the lead author Noé Jiménez visit me at The Acoustics Research Centre at Salford University. This gave me a chance to help Noé develop his ground-breaking idea.
Professor Trevor J Cox
University of Salford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Metadiffusers: Deep-subwavelength sound diffusers, Scientific Reports, July 2017, Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-05710-5.
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