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How Muffler Work
How Muffler Work
If you've ever heard a car engine running without a muffler, you know what
a huge difference a muffler can make to the noise level. Inside a muffler,
you'll find a deceptively simple set of tubes with some holes in them. These
tubes and chambers are actually as finely tuned as a musical instrument.
They are designed to reflect the sound waves produced by the engine in
such a way that they partially cancel themselves out.
Mufflers use some pretty neat technology to cancel out the noise. In this
article, we'll take a look inside a real car muffler and learn about the
principles that make it work.
It turns out that it is possible to add two or more sound waves together and
get less sound. Let's see how.
Located inside the muffler is a set of tubes. These tubes are designed to
create reflected waves that interfere with each other or cancel each other
out. Take a look at the inside of this muffler:
The exhaust gases and the sound waves enter through the center tube.
They bounce off the back wall of the muffler and are reflected through a
hole into the main body of the muffler. They pass through a set of holes into
another chamber, where they turn and go out the last pipe and leave the
muffler.
A chamber called a resonator is connected to the first chamber by a hole.
The resonator contains a specific volume of air and has a specific length
that is calculated to produce a wave that cancels out a certain frequency of
sound. How does this happen? Let's take a closer look ...
The Resonator
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When a wave hits the hole, part of it continues into the chamber and part of
it is reflected. The wave travels through the chamber, hits the back wall of
the muffler and bounces back out of the hole. The length of this chamber is
calculated so that this wave leaves the resonator chamber just after the
next wave reflects off the outside of the chamber. Ideally, the high-pressure
part of the wave that came from the chamber will line up with the low-
pressure part of the wave that was reflected off the outside of the chamber
wall, and the two waves will cancel each other out.
The animation below shows how the resonator works in a simplified muffler.
Waves canceling inside a simplified muffler
In reality, the sound coming from the engine is a mixture of many different
frequencies of sound, and since many of those frequencies depend on the
engine speed, the sound is almost never at exactly the right frequency for
this to happen. The resonator is designed to work best in the frequency
range where the engine makes the most noise; but even if the frequency is
not exactly what the resonator was tuned for, it will still produce some
destructive interference.
Some cars, especially luxury cars where quiet operation is a key feature,
have another component in the exhaust that looks like a muffler, but is
called a resonator. This device works just like the resonator chamber in the
muffler -- the dimensions are calculated so that the waves reflected by the
resonator help cancel out certain frequencies of sound in the exhaust.
There are other features inside this muffler that help it reduce the sound
level in different ways. The body of the muffler is constructed in three
layers: Two thin layers of metal with a thicker, slightly insulated layer
between them. This allows the body of the muffler to absorb some of the
pressure pulses. Also, the inlet and outlet pipes going into the main
chamber are perforated with holes. This allows thousands of tiny pressure
pulses to bounce around in the main chamber, canceling each other out to
some extent in addition to being absorbed by the muffler's housing.
Backpressure and Other Types of Mufflers
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The exhaust from a NASCAR race car: There are no mufflers here, because reducing
backpressure is the name of the game.
These mufflers produce much less restriction, but don't reduce the sound
level as much as conventional mufflers.