A sound absorbing metasurface with coupled resonators

An impedance matched surface is able, in principle, to totally absorb the incident sound and yield no reflection, and this is desired in many acoustic applications. Here we demonstrate a design of impedance matched sound absorbing surface with a simple construction. By coupling different resonators and generating a hybrid resonance mode, we designed and fabricated a metasurface that is impedance-matched to airborne sound at tunable frequencies with subwavelength scale unit cells. With careful design of the coupled resonators, over 99% energy absorption at central frequency of 511 Hz with a 50% absorption bandwidth of 140 Hz is achieved experimentally. The proposed design can be easily fabricated, and is mechanically stable. The proposed metasurface can be used in many sound absorption applications such as loudspeaker design and architectural acoustics. Published by AIP Publishing. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4961671]