| In this research both experimental and numerical investigations are carried out for passive mufflers. These mufflers, both reactive and dissipative, can be used in automotive applications. The reactive mufflers have perforates, baffles, flow plugs and extended inlet/outlet tubes, whereas the dissipative mufflers have sound absorbing materials. A multi-domain boundary element method is used as a numerical technique for modeling such mufflers and predicting their transmission loss. In reactive mufflers, like the concentric resonators and plug flow mufflers, the transfer impedance across the perforate is incorporated in the multi-domain boundary element model. In dissipative mufflers, the sound absorbing material lining is treated both as bulk as well as locally reacting. To successfully incorporate perforates and sound absorbing materials in the boundary element models, experiments are conducted to determine the perforate transfer impedance and the propagation constant, characteristic impedance and surface impedance of the sound absorbing material. To validate the boundary element solution, an analytical one-dimensional solution for a duct with a perforated partition and the transmission loss of a family of reactive and dissipative mufflers are obtained. Various techniques to determine the transmission loss are investigated. One of the techniques, the transfer function method requires the design and fabrication of a perfect anechoic termination of the system, and it is a difficult task. Alternate methods are then investigated, where the transmission loss is computed from the experimentally determined four-pole parameters of the muffler in question. The two-load and the two-source location methods are used to determine the four-pole parameters and then the transmission loss, without the use of an anechoic termination. Excellent agreement is found between the results of the experimental investigation and the boundary element method for the various mufflers. |
