A comparison between various numerical simulation methods for predicting the transmission loss in silencers

Abstract

With the rapid development of high-performance computers, recent years have seen an increasing interest in adopting numerical simulation methods to predict the transmission loss (TL) in silencers. In this paper, two of different numerical simulation methods applied to the computation of TL values are investigated; namely the three-dimensional (3-D) finite element method (FEM) and the time-domain Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method. TL predictions obtained from the two investigated methods are compared with experimental and numerical results in the published literature, and it is concluded that overall, both the methods can be powerful tools to give reasonable predictions for the studied silencers with and without mean flow. Furthermore, a comparative study of the two methods considering the criteria including accuracy, time consumption and ease of use is made. The results presented indicate that the time-domain CFD method can deliver more accurate results but it is much more time-consuming, and the FEM is significantly faster but a little cumbersome to use.