Analysis and design of exhaust mufflers - recent developments

The present practice of design of reactive mufflers for four-stroke cycle engines is partly theoretical and largely empirical, involving prolonged and costly experimentation. The apparent reason for this is the lack of a rational, synthetic approach to design, in the existing technical literature. The analytic approach to muffler design can be to think upon a configuration taking hints from the existing design curves and analyze the same with the actual impedance of the particular exhaust system by means of the classical method or the transfer matrix method. The synthetic approach would call for a method of analysis which would readily bring out the relative performance of the constituent elements and the effect of a particular alteration on the attenuation curve