Computational and Experimental Study on Transmission Loss of Automotive Exhaust Muffler System

Transmission loss and insertion loss are the most frequently used acoustic performance criteria of automotive exhaust mufflers. Transmission loss of a muffler is usually determined and analyzed computationally and experimentally in the development stage of an exhaust system, while insertion loss is the final acoustic performance indicator of the system. In this paper, numerical and experimental approaches are employed to investigate the transmission loss characteristics of an exhaust system and its components separately. The contribution of each component to the overall acoustic attenuation of the system is analyzed and discussed. The insertion loss of the exhaust system is measured and compared with the transmission loss.