Abstract

The expansion and the micro-perforated chamber mufflers are acoustic silencers designed to attenuate the sound propagation at duct systems. These silencers can show interesting phononic crystals behavior when set periodically. The concept of phononic crystals still is an emerging topic in vibration and sound control. The periodic arrangement of acoustic silencers can provide a significant enhancement of the sound absorption due to the “wave filtering” property where the wave cannot propagate at certain frequency ranges, called stopbands or bandgaps. However, these properties may be affected by defects, like the break of the periodicity due to manufacturing errors. For the present work, the influence of some defects on the acoustic efficiency is investigated numerically for expansion and micro-perforated chamber mufflers. A direct and efficient approach is used to obtain the transfer and dynamic stiffness matrices. Simulated examples are used to calculate the forced response, transmission loss, and dispersion diagram, which are verified by other methods.