Parametric Analysis of a PULSCO Vent Silencer
We have conducted a parametric study via numerical simulations of a PULSCO vent silencer. The overall objective is to demonstrate the existence of an optimum system performance for a given set of operating conditions i.e., temperature, pressure, mass flow-rate and the working fluid, by modifying the corresponding geometry of the device. The vent silencer under consideration consists of a perforated diffuser, the silencer body and a tube module. The tube module consists of a set of tubes through which the working fluid passes. The flow tubes are perforated and surrounded with acoustic packing that is responsible for the attenuation. The mathematical model of the vent silencer is built upon Helmholtz equation for the plane wave solution, and the Delany-Bazley model for the acoustic packing. The geometrical parameters chosen for the parametric study include: the porosity of the diffuser and the flow tubes, the type of packing material used for the tube module, bulk density for the acoustic packing and the hole diameter of the perforated diffuser and flow tubes. The equations of the mathematical model are discretized over the computational domain and solved with a finite element method. Numerical results in terms of transmission loss, for the system, indicate that diffuser hole size of 1/4” with porosity of 0.1, flow tube hole size of 1/8” with porosity of 0.23, packing density of 16 kg/m3 for TRS-10 and 100 kg/m3 for Advantex provided the optimum results for the chosen set of conditions. The numerical results were found to be in agreement with experimental data.