Poroelastic materials are well known to possess exclusive properties for sound absorption. However, tuning their properties for achieving the better acoustic performance is not an easy experimental tasks which can be significantly improved by mathematical modelling. In this work we exploit the homogenization procedure to determine the effective properties of an air-saturated material with microstructure. These properties are then used to solve an acoustic problem with the final objective of finding the optimal design microstructural parameters for the highest acoustic absorption. The microstructure of a material is formed by the translation of a unit cell. We study certain topologies of a unit cell to verify their effects on the optimization results. Moreover, we consider different types of a skeleton material (perfectly rigid, stiff and soft frames) and demonstrate the influence of the material properties on the optimal design parameters. Particularly, the effective elastic properties experience different patterns for the stiff and soft matrix materials. It leads to the distinct behavior of the absorption coefficient. Additionally, the optimal design parameters for a poroelastic material with a stiff and rigid frames become identical with the high values of optimal porosity whereas for a material with soft frame the optimal porosity remains low. The developed procedure can be adopted for the studies of related problems, such as optimal acoustic absorption of sandwich panels.
