Acoustic Testing of Flight Hardware Using Loudspeakers: How Much do We Know About This Method of Testing?

Loudspeakers have been used for acoustic qualification of spacecrafts, reflectors, solar panels, and other acoustically responsive structures for more than a decade. Even though a lot of hardware has been acoustic tested using this method, the nature of the acoustic field generated by controlling an ensemble of speakers with and without the hardware in the test volume has not been thoroughly investigated. Limited measurements from some of the recent speaker tests used to qualify flight hardware have indicated significant spatial variation of the acoustic field within the test volume. Also structural responses have been reported to differ when similar tests were performed using reverberant chambers. Unlike the reverberant chamber acoustic test, for which the acoustic field in most chambers is known to be diffuse except below several tens of Hz where acoustic standing waves and large spatial variations exist, the characteristics of the acoustic field within the speaker test volume has not been quantified. It has only been recently that a detailed acoustic field characterization of speaker testing has been made at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) with involvement of various organizations. To address the impact of non-uniform acoustic field on structures, a series of acoustic tests were performed using a flat panel and a 3-ft cylinder exposed to the field controlled by speakers and repeated in a reverberant chamber. The analysis of the data from this exercise reveals that there are significant differences both in the acoustic field and in the structural responses. In this paper the differences between the two methods are reviewed in some detail and the over- or under-testing of articles that could pose un-anticipated structural and flight qualification issues are discussed. A framework for discussing the validity of the speaker acoustic testing method with the current control system and a path forward for improving it will be provided.