While airplane noise may not have any long-term effect on a person’s hearing abilities, many find the experience unpleasant. And the reason some of us have to suffer through this is because planes are built to be light.
The ceilings and floors of airplanes use a honeycomb structure, which provides strength without adding much weight. Sadly, this structure is also very effective in letting sound through. So all the unwelcome sounds of jet engines and rotor blades get plugged right in to your ears.
There are two options to deal with the problem: come up with something that’s more effective than the honeycomb structure, or find an insulator that does the job without adding too much weight. There’s probably nothing that beats the honeycomb structure in its strength-to-weight ratio, so Yun Jing and his colleagues at North Carolina State University set out to look for a new insulator.
In a study published in Applied Physics Letters, they report developing just such a metamaterial, which are synthetically-created materials that have properties not found in nature. They are made by using regular materials assembled in such a way to grant them what physicists from a different era might have dubbed “miraculous properties.”
Yun’s metamaterial is made up of latex—yes, the same stuff used to make condoms—but it is tethered to the honeycomb structure in such a way that it has negative density. Yun told Quartz that the best
Article source: http://qz.com/392878/this-special-material-can-make-airplane-noise-go-away-for-all-passengers/
