Porous liner coated inlet duct: a novel approach to attenuate automotive turbocharger inlet flow-induced sound propagation

Abstract

Automotive turbochargers generate high-frequency noise, especially at their inlet air duct, which has become a long-standing problem for both passengers and pedestrians and hence is required to be mitigated by provisions such as the use of absorptive materials and novel inlet duct designs. This paper proposes utilizing a thin porous material coating liner on the inlet duct of the turbocharger compressor in order to absorb the incident excitation and hence, broadband reduction of the flow-induced sound wave propagation. To this end, first, a sound-absorbing inlet duct model is designed based on efficient structural parameters. Then, three different types of absorptive materials are used as coating liners to analyze the impact of varying material properties on the acoustic absorption performance of the system. Meanwhile, a sensitivity analysis is carried out to evaluate the influence of coating layer thickness on the system’s flow-induced sound insulation performance. The research involves applying a finite element approach to conducting acoustic pressure and poroacoustics studies over the desired frequency range of human hearing (1–20 kHz). In this regard, sound transmission loss (TL) and sound pressure level (SPL) are investigated for the models with and without liners. The results indicate that sound-absorbing materials can be employed to significantly diminish flow-induced sound levels in the turbocharger inlet duct. According to the results, absorptive liners would considerably increase the maximum TL and lessen the sharp drop in TL that appeared in the model without liners at around 4321 Hz. In addition, the average TL has increased due to the replacement of valleys with peaks. The sensitivity analyses demonstrated that denser absorptive materials and larger liner thicknesses are associated with higher TL levels and better sound attenuation response. By adding 15 mm of rock wool liner to the designed inlet duct, the average TL and root mean square of TL were increased up to and respectively. The proposed design procedure of this study unlocks a fundamental approach that can be practically applied to many promising fields, such as aerospace and automotive engineering.