Study on plate silencer with general boundary conditions

• We present an analytical method for performance analysis of a plate silencer.
• A plate silencer with various boundary conditions can be analyzed by this method.
• The effect of released boundary restrictions depends on the situation.
• The softer the boundaries are, the stiffer plate the optimal silencer requires.

A plate silencer consists of an expansion chamber with two side-branch rigid cavities covered by plates. Previous studies showed that, in a duct, the introduction of simply supported or clamped plates into an air conveying system could achieve broadband quieting from low to medium frequencies. In this study, analytical formulation is extended to the plate silencer with general boundary conditions. A set of static beam functions, which are a combination of sine series and third-order polynomial, is employed as the trial functions of the plate vibration velocity. Green׳s function and Kirchhoff–Helmholtz integral are used to solve the sound radiation in the duct and the cavity, and then the vibration velocity of the plate is obtained. Having obtained the vibration velocity, the pressure perturbations induced by the plate oscillation and the transmission loss are found. Optimization is carried out in order to obtain the widest stopband. The transmission loss calculated by the analytical method agrees closely with the result of the finite element method simulation. Further studies with regard to the plate under several different classical boundary conditions based on the validated model show that a clamped-free plate silencer has the worst stopband. Attempts to release the boundary restriction of the plate are also made to study its effect on sound reflection. Results show that a softer end for a clamped–clamped plate silencer helps increase the optimal bandwidth, while the same treatment for simply supported plate silencer will result in performance degradation.