Ultra-thin Acoustic Metasurface-Based Schroeder Diffuser

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ultra-thin acoustic metasurface-based Schroeder diffuser that achieves effective sound diffusion with significantly reduced thickness, enabling new applications in acoustics and related fields.

Contribution

It presents a novel design of ultra-thin, planar Schroeder diffusers using acoustic metasurfaces, demonstrating their effectiveness through numerical and experimental validation.

Findings

Achieves satisfactory sound diffusion with one order of magnitude thinner design.

Demonstrates potential for applications in architectural acoustics and noise control.

Provides a major step towards practical acoustic metasurface devices.

Abstract

Schroeder diffuser is a classical design, proposed over 40 years ago, for artificially creating optimal and predictable sound diffuse reflection. It has been widely adopted in architectural acoustics and it has also shown substantial potential in noise control, ultrasound imaging, microparticle manipulation, among others. The conventional Schroeder diffuser, however, has a considerable thickness on the order of one wavelength, severely impeding its applications for low frequency sound. In this paper, a new class of ultra-thin and planar Schroeder diffusers are proposed based on the concept of acoustic metasurface. Both numerical and experimental results demonstrate satisfactory sound diffuse reflection produced from the metasurface-based Schroeder diffuser despite it being one order of magnitude thinner than the conventional one. The proposed design not only offer promising building blocks with great potential to profoundly impact architectural acoustics and related fields, but also constitutes a major step towards real-world applications of acoustic metasurfaces.