Measurement and Simulation of Two-Inlet Single-Outlet Mufflers

In several applications, two-inlet single-outlet mufflers are possible to encounter in exhaust systems. They are usually used to merge two exhaust streams from two similar engines or from two sides of an engine. They have an advantage of reducing the back pressure on the engine(s). There is a lot of published research on the analysis of single-inlet single-outlet mufflers acting as a two-port. On the other hand, there are a few publications on the analysis of two-inlet single-outlet mufflers due to their complexity representing a three-port. A three-port is characterized by a 3×3 Scattering Matrix. The nine elements of this matrix represent the 3 reflection coefficients at each port, and the 6 transmission coefficients between the 3 ports in both directions. In this work, a two-inlet single-outlet muffler is studied. The elements of the scattering matrix were measured using the two-source two-microphone technique with and without flow. These elements were also calculated from 1D simulation using a set of two-port elements representing the internal dimensions of the muffler, and compared to those obtained from the measurement. A similar 1D simulation was performed using Flow two-ports in order to analyze the flow distribution inside the muffler and the pressure drop across both flow paths. The flow distribution is crucial to obtain accurate acoustic predictions. For all cases, there was a very good agreement between the measurement and the simulations.