Recently, a new class of ceramic foams with porosity levels up to 90% has been developed as a result of the association of the gelcasting process and aeration of the ceramic suspension. This paper presents and discusses original results advertising sound absorbing capabilities of such foams. The authors man- ufactured three types of alumina foams in order to investigate three porosity levels, namely: 72, 88, and 90%. The microstructure of foams was examined and typical dimensions and average sizes of cells (pores) and cell-linking windows were found for each porosity case. Then, the acoustic absorption coefficient was measured in a wide frequency range for several samples of various thickness cut out from the foams. The results were discussed and compared with the acoustic absorption of typical polyurethane foams proving that the alumina foams with high porosity of 88-90% have excellent sound absorbing properties competitive with the quality of sound absorbing PU foams of higher porosity.

Accurate definition of boundary conditions is of crucial importance for room acoustic predictions because the wall impedance phase angle can affect the sound field in rooms and acoustic parameters applied to assess a room reverberation. In this paper, the issue was investigated theoretically using the convolution integral and a modal representation of the room impulse response for complex-valued boundary conditions. Theoretical considerations have been accompanied with numerical simulations carried out for a rectangular room. The case of zero phase angle, which is often assumed in room acoustic simulations, was taken as a reference, and differences in the sound pressure level and decay times were determined in relation to this case. Calculation results have shown that a slight deviation of the phase angle with respect to the phase equal to zero can cause a perceptual difference in the sound pressure level. This effect was found to be due to a change in modal frequencies as a result of an increase or decrease in the phase angle. Simulations have demonstrated that surface distributions of decay times are highly irregular, while a much greater range of the early decay time compared to the reverberation time range indicates that a decay curve is nonlinear. It was also found that a difference between the decay times predicted for the complex impedance and real impedance is especially clearly audible for the largest impedance phase angles because it corresponds approximately to 4 just noticeable differences for the reverberation metrics.