A CFD results-based approach to investigating acoustic attenuation performance and pressure loss of car perforated tube silencers

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach to investigating the effect of different temperatures and flow velocities on the acoustic performance of silencers in a more accurate and meticulous fashion, based on steady computational results of the flow field inside the silencer using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). This approach can transfer the CFD results-including temperature and flow velocity distribution-to acoustic meshes by mesh mapping. A numerical simulation on the sound field inside the silencer is then performed, using the CFD results as a boundary condition. This approach facilitates the analysis of complex silencer designs such as perforated tube silencers, and the numerical predictions are verified by a comparison with available experimental data. In the case of the three-pass perforated tube silencer of a car, the proposed approach is implemented to calculate the transmission loss (TL) of the silencer at different temperatures and flow velocities. We found that increasing the air temperature shifts the TL curve to a higher frequency and reduces the acoustic attenuation at most frequencies. As the air flow increases, the curve moves to a lightly lower frequency and the acoustic attenuation increases slightly. Additionally, the pressure loss of perforated tube silencers could be calculated according to the total pressure distribution of their inlet and outlet from the steady computational results using CFD.