The AES Audio Product Education Institute (APEI) to promote methodologies, practices and technologies involved in developing and bringing audio products to market, will launch its Modeling and Measurement series of events with the webinar Multiphysics Simulation in Audio Product Design on Wednesday, April 14 (12:00pm EDT).
In this webinar, Mads J. Herring Jensen (Technology Manager Acoustics, COMSOL), Tim Whitwell (VP Engineering, Tectonic Audio Labs and Nagi Elabbasi (Partner, Veryst Engineering), will share their experiences in three separate sessions, with an interactive Q&A at the end of the sessions to address questions from online attendees. The event will provide an overview of the use of simulation in audio product design, addressing virtual prototyping, testing, measurement, multiphysics simulation, and optimization.
The webinar will explore the ways companies are using simulation in audio product design with examples from specific projects. The presenters will also share how simulation apps can enable collaborative design where team members with different expertise and perspectives can use simulation to explore new concepts and make design decisions. Exploring simulation resources that are available in this domain, the presentations will address how simulation is used for loudspeaker optimization, how it can be used to evaluate noise reduction strategies and how it enables the creation of virtual prototypes of new audio products.
As contemporary listening habits have changed considerably in the last decade, particularly with the widespread adoption of smart speaker devices, today’s listener is rarely positioned in the loudspeaker’s “sweet spot,” directly facing the drive units. As a result, the single-point sound pressure level (SPL) measurement is not as relevant a metric for quantifying a listener’s experience in a given environment. In the first session of the event, titled Measuring and Simulating the Acoustic Sound Power Response of Loudspeaker Drive Units, Whitwell will describe the more relevant sound power response measurement, covering how it can be measured, and how it can be simulated using COMSOL’s Multiphysics software tool.
In the session Noise Reduction Through Measurement and Simulation: Case Studies, Elabbasi will discuss how engineering firms are increasingly relying on acoustic simulations to improve their products and shorten their design cycles. The presentation will detail several acoustics-focused projects where the application involved noise reduction. In these examples, simulation was combined with acoustic/vibration measurements to identify the sources of noise in consumer products. The designs were then modified accordingly to achieve significant levels of noise reduction. The presentation will also briefly discuss other acoustics analyses involving nondestructive testing, ultrasonic tissue ablation and thermoviscous acoustics.
In the final session, Insight and Innovation Through Simulation, Jensen will share how the role of simulation and virtual prototypes in the audio industry has grown rapidly within the last decade, allowing companies to reduce the number of physical prototypes required ready a product for manufacturing and thus reduce the development time. Jensen will provide examples of simulations that give engineers insights not readily revealed by measurements. The presentation will also look at how optimization can be used for novel designs and for improving the performance of an existing design.
The webinar from the Audio Product Education Institute’s Modeling and Measurement education pillar underscores the AES’s commitment to providing its membership and the industry at large with information on real-world solutions for audio product development.
Webinar registration: audioproducteducationinstitute.org/multiphysics-simulation-in-audio-product-design/…