MAVO Polymeracoustics

Plastics are ideal construction materials: light, usually inexpensive and complex, 3D moldable and often suitable for mass production. However, the low weight is unfortunately not ideal from an acoustic point of view. It is therefore all the more important to exploit the potentials for an acoustic optimization of these materials, designs and manufacturing techniques in order to achieve a significant reduction in noise emissions caused by devices with plastic casings.

As part of the Fraunhofer internal research project "PolymerAcoustics", a comprehensive range of Fraunhofer technology is being developed to reduce the sound emissions of small electrical appliances and to optimize them especially in terms of psychoacoustics.

The work in the "PolymerAcoustics" project includes:

• New polymer-based material concepts with adjustable acoustic properties for large-scale production processes
• Microstructure-based material models, taking into account scattering, for the prediction of acoustically relevant material properties
• Implementation of the material models in structure-borne and airborne sound simulation methods for the description of component behavior
• Space-optimized concepts designed for improving the acoustics;
  use of enhanced (hybrid) plastics processing methods
• Construction guidelines for the acoustic optimization and sound design of plastic casings.

• Fraunhofer ICT (Projektcoordination)
• Fraunhofer IWM
• Fraunhofer IWU