Fundamental constraints on broadband passive acoustic treatments in unidimensional scattering problems

Abstract

In a passive lossy acoustical system, sum rules derived from passivity explicitly relate the broadband response to the spatial dimension of the system, which provide important design criteria as well. In this work, the theory of Herglotz function is applied systematically to derive sum rules for unidimensional scattering problems relying on passive acoustic treatments which are generally made of rigid, motionless and subwavelength structures saturated by air. The rigid-boundary reflection, soft-boundary reflection and transmission problems are analysed. The derived sum rules are applied for guiding the designs of passive absorbers and mufflers: the required minimum space is directly predicted from the target (i.e. the desired absorption or transmission-loss spectra) without any specific design. Besides, it is possible to break this type of sum rules and fundamental constraints in particular cases. This property, if well used, could result in ultra-compact absorbers working at long wavelength up to infinity.