A CFD Approach to the Computation of the Acoustic Response of Exhaust Mufflers

The study of the three-dimensional acoustic field inside an exhaust muffler is usually performed through the numerical solution of the linearized equations. In this paper, an alternative procedure is proposed, in which the full equations are solved in the time domain. The procedure is based on the CFD simulation of an impulsive test, so that the transmission loss may be computed and compared with measurements and other numerical approaches. Also, the details of the flow inside the muffler may be studied, both in the time and the frequency domains. The results obtained compare favorably with a conventional FEM calculation, mostly in the ability of the procedure to account for dissipative processes inside the muffler.