This paper investigates the Transmission Loss (TL) of compressor suction mufflers. The small diameters of the inlet and outlet tubes cause practical problems for the experimental measurement of the TL. A numerical analysis of the TL is performed to predict the muffler efficiency. The literature presents different techniques to obtain the transmission loss experimentally, such as the decomposition method, the two-source method, the two-load method and the transfer matrix method. The aim of this work is to present a numerical and experimental investigation of the transmission loss of a simple expansion chamber and a compressor muffler. Numerical results obtained using the Finite Element Method (FEM) are compared with experimental results. The experimental apparatus consists of a sound source and four microphone probes that are used due to the small diameters of the inlet and outlet tubes of the compressor muffler. Both numerical and experimental results present inaccuracies due to the limitations of the numerical model and the experimental set-up. The combined analysis shows the validity and the limitations of both numerical and experimental methodologies.
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