NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL TECHNIQUES FOR ASSESSING THE ACOUSTIC PERFORMANCE OF DUCT SYSTEMS ABOVE THE PLANE WAVE CUTOFF FREQUENCY

This research deals with determining the acoustic attenuation of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) ductwork. A finite element approach was developed for calculating insertion loss and breakout transmission loss. Procedures for simulating the source and receiving rooms were developed and the effect of structureborne flanking was included. Simulation results have been compared with measurements from the literature and the agreement is very good. With a good model in place, the work was extended in three ways. 1) Since measurements on full-scale equipment are difficult, scale modeling rules were developed and validated. 2) Two different numerical approaches were developed for evaluating the transmission loss of silencers taking into account the effect of higher order modes. 3) A power transfer matrix approach was developed to assess the acoustic performance of several duct components connected in series