A three dimensional investigation into the acoustic performance of dissipative splitter silencers

Splitter silencers are found in ventilation and gas turbine systems and consist of parallel baffles of porous material placed within a duct so that they split the mean gas flow. Theoretical investigations into dissipative splitter silencers have generally been limited to two dimensions and this limits the analysis to finding the silencer eigenmodes or, for a finite length silencer, to rectangular baffles only. In this article a numerical point collocation approach is used to extend theoretical predictions to three dimensions. This facilitates the analysis of more complex silencer designs such as "bar" silencers and theoretical predictions are validated by comparison with experimental measurements. The insertion loss of different silencer designs is evaluated and the performance of a bar silencer is compared to traditional designs for rectangular and circular ducts. It is shown that a bar silencer with a volume of material identical to an equivalent parallel baffle design delivers a significant improvement in insertion loss at higher frequencies, although this is at the expense of a small reduction in performance at low frequencies. It is also shown that under most circumstances it is possible to get good agreement between prediction and experiment even for relatively large Helmholtz numbers.