An experimental model was made to investigate the influence of force and acoustic excitation on the vibration and underwater sound radiation of the stiffened conical-cylindrical shell. Meanwhile, a coupled precise transfer matrix method and wave superposition method was also proposed to analyze vibro-acoustic responses of combined shells. To test accuracy of the present method, vibration and acoustic results of combined shells are firstly examined. As expected, results of present method are in excellent agreement with the ones in literature and model test. The experimental results show that free vibrations of the experimental test are consistent with the literature data and the present method’s results. Forced vibration and acoustic test results are also well agreed with the numerical results from the coupled precise transfer matrix method/wave superposition method. The comparisons show that the coupled precise transfer matrix method/wave superposition method is reliable and credible to solve the vibro-acoustic response of combined shells. The analysis shows that the acoustic excitation is the key factor for radiated noise in low-frequency range. However, the radiated noise resulted from force excitation is dominant in mid-high frequency band.

This paper reverse-design phononic crystals with band gaps within a targeted frequency band using the trained conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) and further studies the vibro-acoustic characteristics of a composite sandwich plate with a phononic crystal panel as the core layer. Firstly, a matrix composed of 0 s and 1 s, representing scatterers and substrates, is randomly generated by MATLAB to represent two-dimensional phononic crystals. The three-dimensional phononic crystals are obtained by stretching the two-dimensional phononic crystals along the average direction, and COMSOL Multiphysics is used to calculate the band gap. In order to maximize the production of phononic crystals with a band gap distribution, the convolutional neural network is trained to predict whether the generated phononic crystals have band gaps. Finally, using data on the structures of phononic crystals and their band gap distributions, the CVAE is trained to achieve the reverse design of artificial periodic structures based on the target band gap. To verify the effectiveness of the structures obtained through the reverse design method on vibration and noise reduction, the submerged vibro-acoustic characteristics of a composite sandwich plate are studied. The plate consists of a phononic crystal panel and carbon fiber panels. The model of the composite sandwich plate is fabricated, and its submerged vibro-acoustic characteristics are tested and compared with numerical results. Finally, the submerged vibro-acoustic response levels of composite sandwich plates with phononic crystal panels and honeycomb panels as core layers are compared using numerical methods. This comparison assesses the phononic crystal panel’s vibration and noise reduction effects.

A power flow analysis of finite coupled Mindlin plates with a blocking mass at the junction of the coupled plates is investigated using the method of reverberation-ray matrix (MRRM). An exact solution is derived by the plate equations of motion to satisfy the boundary condition. The wave amplitude coefficients are obtained from the continuity conditions at driving force locations, and the line junction of two plates connected at an arbitrary angle. The blocking mass located at the junction of the two plates is modeled as a Timoshenko beam. The dynamic responses of the finite coupled Mindlin plates are verified by comparing with finite element method (FEM) results. The effects of the connected angles, blocking mass, and structural damping on the input power and transmitted power are calculated and analyzed. Numerical simulations of the finite coupled Mindlin plates with a blocking mass show that the present method can predict the dynamic behavior.