Status of NASA's Bio-inspired Broadband Acoustic Absorber

The Bio-inspired Broadband Acoustic Absorber is a promising, recently-patented invention that we can use to increase the peace and quiet in the world through efforts to bring it from concept to service. A growing number of experiments have demonstrated that synthetic structures that resemble bundles of natural reeds offer an increase in sound absorption at frequencies below 1000 Hz compared to state-of-the-art commercially available structures of similar thickness, volume, and weight.