Acoustics Simulation for High-Tech

High-Tech consumers are constantly driving manufacturers to produce smaller devices with more features. For example, today’s cell phones are much smaller than 5 years ago but may now include a camera, music player, web or wireless connectivity, video capability, GPS and more. This progress offers a particular set of problems for acoustics design.

• The speaker itself has to be smaller and so more power is needed to produce the same acoustic response as a larger speaker.
• The smaller overall device size, containing many closely spaced components, means that less space is available for acoustic cavities.
• The air present in the small back volume behind the speaker resists the displacement of the diaphragm and hence the sound it generates, particularly at lower frequencies.
• Nonlinear materials such as rubber or fiber materials are often used to damp out high response at resonant frequencies or as a protective shield to guard the unit from environmental effects.

In such cases, simple circuit simulation tools, that assume the system to comprise of lumped mass parameters, fail to produce accurate results.

The Abaqus Multiphysics FEA product suite from SIMULIA integrates noise simulation within the finite element solver, allowing fully-coupled structural-acoustic simulations to be performed within familiar Abaqus workflows. Furthermore, the compatibility of the Abaqus product family allows the same structural mesh to be used for other load cases, for example, a drop test or thermal simulations.