Determining the specific area of porous acoustic materials from water extraction data

Philippe Leclaire (1) , Mark Swift (1) , Kirill Horoshenkov (1)

1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The internal pore surface area per unit mass of solid (specific area) is an important parameter for the physical study of sound wave propagation in porous media. It is shown that this parameter can be evaluated with a reasonable accuracy from the integration of the water extraction curve (volume of water extracted versus applied pressure). This method is nonacoustic, modelless and well adapted to acoustic materials. It is a complementary method to the standard BET (Brunauer, Emmet, Teller) technique, generally used for powders in chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry. Experiments are made on loose glass beads of a few hundred microns diameter and results are compared to theoretical values. Results on heterogeneous materials used in civil engineering and in noise control are also given. The parameters necessary for the description of modem acoustic materials are estimated from the specific area measured by this method.

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Matériaux; Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Philippe Leclaire, Mark Swift, Kirill Horoshenkov. Determining the specific area of porous acoustic materials from water extraction data. Journal of Applied Physics, 1998, ⟨10.1063/1.368985⟩. ⟨hal-01330330⟩