An effective silencer design for artificially air conditioned environment

An effective silencer for an air conditioning duct is studied. A duct with an acoustically soft boundary is employed as an effective silencer. On the acoustically soft boundary the sound pressure is zero and it is impossible to realize such boundary in the air-borne sound field, because of the non-existence of a much lighter medium than the air. In this study, the arrangement of one-quarter wave-length acoustic tubes is employed as a soft boundary. This acoustic tube has frequency dependence, but the sound pressure becomes nearly zero at the tube mouth around the odd resonance frequency. The relation between the noise reduction efficiency and this acoustically soft boundary is examined experimentally and more than 40 dB noise reduction is obtained in a one-half octave band around the first resonance frequency. It is also made clear that more than one wave length of soft boundary is required to get enough reduction compared with the reduction obtained in the case of quite a long soft boundary.