Sound radiation from piping systems in enclosures: Its prediction and management

Abstract

In enclosures, the interior sound field driven by the piping systems severely reduces living comfort. Although commercial finite element softwares have been widely used, their high computational cost, especially in the optimization process, greatly limits its efficiency in practical applications. This research proposes a novel and fast analytical framework aimed at efficiently predicting the interior sound field. This analytical framework first idealizes a vibrating pipe per unit length as a dipole source ignoring water-borne noise inside the pipe, and further linearly superimposes such elements along the pipe axis to obtain a dipole line source. Finally, the modal expansion method is used to calculate the interior sound field driven by the dipole line source, where pipe's diameter should be much smaller than the wavelength. As a result, our theoretical framework is validated both by finite element method and elaborately designed acrylic enclosure experiments, which has demonstrated high computational accuracy and significant computational efficiency advantages. Furthermore, we utilize this framework to efficiently optimize the interior sound field in a cuboid enclosure to obtain a quiet area. This study offers a promising strategy for quickly assessing sound radiation of piping systems and makes their acoustic optimization possible.