Professor Franzoni's research areas include: acoustics, and structural dynamics and vibration. Practical applications of this work include: acoustics of enclosures (rooms or vehicle interiors) and underwater acoustics (acoustic radiation and scattering from submarines).
Professor Franzoni's interior noise research has focused on developing improved methods for predicting sound pressure levels in acoustic spaces which contain high-frequency sound waves with moderate damping. For these types of sound fields, accurate prediction methods currently require extensive computational effort. Professor Franzoni's research goal is to develop computationally efficient methods that provide the acoustician with a fairly detailed description of the sound field.
Professor Franzoni's work in underwater acoustics has focused on applying Bliss' method of Analytical/Numerical Matching (ANM) to the prediction of acoustic radiation and scattering from flexible elastic submerged structures with discontinuities. Work is underway to implement this method in existing Navy computer codes. A recent extension of this work is a novel method for the homogenization of structures using a local/global decomposition method. The result is a reduction in computational effort for certain types of problems.