Sound Radiation from Structures

Abstract

Any discussion of structure-borne sound would be incomplete without a thorough treatment of sound radiation, because in practice one usually cares much less about the magnitude of the structural vibrations and about how they are transmitted and distributed than about the loudness of the sound that is radiated to the surroundings. In order to predict this sound radiation with some confidence, one needs to know the vibration amplitudes as functions of frequency, as well as their spatial distribution. For radiation into a relatively dense medium, such as water, loading of the vibrating bodies by the ambient medium also often plays a significant role. Thus, one needs to have a considerable amount of detailed information (of the type discussed in the previous chapters) before one can evaluate the airborne sound produced by structural vibrations.