Title
Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA): predicting the transmission of noise and vibration through complex structures at higher frequencies

Introduction
Predicting the transmission of noise and vibration through practical structures of engineering interest, across a broad frequency range, presents a number of challenges to an analyst.  At low frequencies, the response of a system is typically dominated by a small number of modes; standard analysis methods based on finite elements, boundary elements and infinite elements typically provide an accurate description of the response.  At higher frequencies, such methods are seldom practical.  The reasons are twofold.  Firstly, the number of degrees of freedom required to describe the response becomes intractable at higher frequencies.  For example, a 2 m section of a typical wide-body commercial aircraft fuselage has approximately 400,000 structural modes and 8 million interior acoustic modes below 10 kHz; a typical automotive minivan has approximately 150,000 structural modes and 1 million interior acoustic modes across the same frequency range.  Despite recent advances in computational efficiency, current deterministic models are typically restricted to problems involving no more than a few thousand modes.  The second, more fundamental problem, however, is that the higher order modes of a system tend to be particularly sensitive to small perturbations in the properties of the system.  Small uncertainties in the geometry, material properties and boundary conditions of a system can lead to large uncertainties in the dynamic response.  A statistical description of a system becomes essential in order to draw meaningful conclusions about the response.
Such problems led to the development of ‘Statistical Energy Analysis’ (SEA) in the early 1960s.  Broadly speaking, SEA represents a field of study in which statistical descriptions of a system are adopted in order to simplify the analysis of complicated structural-acoustic problems.  The past forty years have seen significant advances in the method, (both in terms of the underlying theory and in the estimation of the parameters used in an SEA model) and improvements are still being actively researched and developed.  Today, SEA is used routinely in virtually every industry for which noise and vibration are of concern.
Applications include: the prediction of automobile and aircraft interior noise, the design of poro-elastic ‘sound packages’ and noise control treatments, the specification of dynamic environments for launch vehicles and satellites, the design of quiet consumer appliances and the acoustic design of ships, submarines and buildings.

Objective
The objective of this course is to provide an overview of modern predictive SEA methods.  The course will discuss the physics of high frequency noise and vibration transmission from both modal and wave viewpoints.
The derivation of the underlying SEA equations will be discussed and the parameters used in an SEA model will be summarized.  Particular emphasis will be placed on the theoretical aspects of the wave approach to SEA; the physics of wave propagation in commonly encountered structural and acoustic subsystems will therefore be discussed in detail.  The calculation of the parameters that govern vibro-acoustic energy input, storage, transmission and dissipation will be discussed.  Typical SEA applications will be reviewed along with areas of current research.
 
Instructor
The instructor is Dr. Phil Shorter from the ESI Group.  Phil is the Director of Vibro-Acoustic Product Operations at ESI and oversees the maintenance and development of the commercial vibro-acoustics code VA One (which includes the SEA code AutoSEA2).

The Short Courses 02 fee is 200.00 € + %18 VAT / per person.
For reservation to the Short Course 02 please, use Online Registration Form on the Registration Module.