Flow and Pressure Drop Calculation Using Two-Ports

Exhaust systems should be carefully designed for different applications. The main objective of an exhaust system is to reduce the engine noise. Maximum noise reduction is usually desired to the limit of a certain backpressure, which is set by the engine manufacturer in order not to deteriorate the engine efficiency. Therefore, a parallel calculation of the flow and pressure drop must be performed. The amount of flow flowing through each element will also affect its acoustic properties. Usually, acoustic and flow calculations are done separately on two different software. This paper describes a new technique that enables both calculations to be done using the same input data on the same platform. Acoustic calculations are usually performed in the frequency domain in the plane wave region using the two-port theory and then the acoustic pressure in the system is solved for using well-known algorithms to handle arbitrary connected two-ports. The stagnation pressure and volume flow can also be calculated using the same algorithm by deriving a flow two-port for each element using the stagnation pressure and the volume flow velocity as the state variables. The proposed theory is first discussed listing the flow matrices for common elements in exhaust elements, and then different systems are analyzed and compared with the measurements.