This study was motivated by the fact that the cicadas singing sound is heard very loudly in the summer time whereas its body size is quite small. Additional interesting aspect is that some species of cicadas emit very broad-band sound as well. These facts suggest that the singing mechanism of cicadas can offer a good idea in the design of a new acoustic actuator. The main parts of cicadas singing organ are comprised of abdomen cavity and tymbal. The pulling of tymbal muscle which is connected to the tymbal causes a large deformation of tymbal and the sound due to this large deformation is amplified by a backing cavity producing a broad-band loud sound. In this study, the abdominal cavity was modeled as a bass-reflex enclosure model. Tymbal action was modeled as a nonlinear motion of a curved thin plate excited externally. An analogous system comprised of a thin-shell curved plate system excited at the center was tested experimentally and simulated numerically in order to investigate the parametric characteristics. Because the acoustic output power of a curved plate was found to have a pseudo linear range with the amplitude of excitation force, it was concluded that the output power could be controllable. It was observed that the change of acoustic output according to the changes of geometric parameter or radius of curvature bear no definite relationship. The results revealed that such an analogous system to the cicadas singing organ can suggest a design concept for a new acoustic actuator.
