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A production muffler of a 2.2 liter compression ignition engine is analyzed using plane wave (Transfer Matrix) method. The objective is to show the usefulness of plane wave models to analyze the acoustic performance (Transmission Loss, TL) of a compact hybrid muffler (made up of reactive and dissipative elements). The muffler consists of three chambers, two of which are acoustically short in the axial direction. The chambers are separated by an impervious baffle on the upstream side and a perforated plate on the downstream side. The first chamber is a Concentric Tube Resonator (CTR). The second chamber consists of an extended inlet and a flow reversal 180-degree curved outlet duct. The acoustic cavity in the third chamber is coupled with the second chamber through the acoustic impedances of the end plate and the perforated plate.

The excitation to a vehicle is from two sources, road excitation and powertrain excitation. Vehicle Suspension is designed to isolate the road excitation coming to passenger cabin. Powertrain mounts play a vital role in isolating the engine excitation. The current study focuses on developing an analytical approach using Low-Fidelity computer programs to design the Powertrain Mount layout and stiffness during the initial stage of product development. Three programs have been developed as a part of this study that satisfy the packaging needs, NVH requirements and static load bearing requirements. The applications are capable of providing the Kinetic Energy Distribution and Static Analysis (Powertrain Enveloping and Mount Durability) for 3-point and 4-point mounting systems and the ideal mount positions and stiffness for 3-point mounting systems.

The bias flow in Concentric Tube Resonator (CTR) is a flow-induced phenomenon in which the pressure gradient along the radial direction is produced by the kinetic energy of the flow. As a result, the flow dynamics in CTR is characterized by bias flow into the annular cavity in the upstream and outflow from the annular cavity in the downstream of the flow. This is due to the change in direction of the radial component of the bias flow at a point called the point of recovery, as a consequence of mass conservation. The pressure drop of CTR is a complex function of the momentum flux and other geometric parameters such as porosity, open area ratio, discharge coefficient of the perforated holes, bias inflow, bias outflow, grazing flow and length. In this study, numerical experiments are conducted to obtain an empirical formula for the friction factor of perforated pipes which are extensively used in automotive mufflers.

A typical powertrain mount design process starts with performing the system calculations to determine optimum mount parameters, viz. position, orientation and stiffness values to meet the desired NVH targets. Therefore, a 6 degrees of freedom lumped parameter system of powertrain and mounts is modelled in Matlab®. The approach is to decouple the torque roll axis mode from the remaining five rigid body modes so that the response to the torque pulses is predominantly ‘oscillations about Torque Roll Axis’. This is achieved by optimizing the above mount parameters within specified constraints so that ‘Rotation about the torque roll axis’ is one of the natural modes of vibration. The tool developed here uses ‘Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO) algorithm’ because of its ease of implementation and better convergence to the solution. The algorithm is programmed in TK solver®.