Initial investigations concerning modelling of sound propagation in ducts with ANC by means of two-port theory and FEM

Today mechanical ventilation systems are installed in many buildings to handle the ventilation. Such ventilation systems constitute a potential source of unwanted background noise in the buildings. In order to reduce the noise propagating through the ducts passive silencers are normally installed as a part of the ventilation system. However, the passive silencers are relatively ineffective in the low frequency range. A solution can be to use a combination of active noise control (ANC) and passive techniques where the ANC system extends the noise attenuation to include the low frequency noise. The construction of the ventilation systems can vary substantially between different buildings and may contain many different duct parts in different compositions etc. Hence, it may not be trivial to find a cost- and performance efficient installation of an ANC system in a ventilation system, e.g. to find a proper installation position of it and suitable passive silencers to combine it with, finding out if one or several ANC systems should be used, and so on. In order to make the design of a complete ventilation system (including one or several ANC systems) cost- and time efficient, an adequate mathematical model of the duct is required. The purpose of the model is to describe sound propagation in the duct. Such model can be built e.g. based on the two-port theory or by finite element method. In this paper initial investigations concerning modelling of standard duct parts were performed. Simulations were carried out to find parameters such as Noise Reduction etc., using both plane wave two-port theory and finite element modelling. The results of the simulations were compared with measurement results