Hybrid silencers with micro-perforated panels and internal partitions

A sub-structuring approach, along with a unit cell treatment, is proposed to model expansion chamber silencers with internal partitions and micro-perforated panels (MPPs) in the absence of internal flow. The side-branch of the silencer is treated as a combination of unit cells connected in series. It is shown that, by connecting multiple unit cells with varying parameters, the noise attenuation bandwidth can be enlarged. With MPPs, the hybrid noise attenuation mechanism of the silencer is revealed. Depending on the size of the perforation hole, noise attenuation can be dominated by dissipative, reactive, or combined effects together. For a broadband sound absorption, the hole size, together with the perforation ratio and other parameters, can be optimized to strike a balance between the dissipative and reactive effect, for ultimately achieving the desired noise attenuation performance within a prescribed frequency region. The modular nature of the proposed formulation allows doing this in a flexible, accurate, and cost effective manner. The accuracy of the proposed approach is validated through comparisons with finite element method and experiments.