International Journal of Advanced Scientific and Technical Research Issue 3 volume 4, July-August 2013

Available online on http://www.rspublication.com/ijst/index.html ISSN 2249-9954

DESIGN OPTIMIZATION OF INDUSTRIAL STEAM

VENT SILENCER FOR BETTER FLOW PROCESS AND
NOISE REDUCTION BY CFD AND SIDLAB
SIMULATION

Shahid Nadeem#1, ∗, K.S.Shashishekar #2,

#1. M.Tech student (Thermal Power Engineering), Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkur-572103, Mobile no: 8951790754
#2. Professor & Dean, Department of Mechanical Engineering,Siddaganga Institute of
Technology,Tumkur-572103, Mobile no:9844538083.

______________________________________________________________________________

ABSTRACT

With the tightening of noise regulations, industrial facilities are required to stay in compliance
with regulations, here comes the usage of vent silencers which are mainly used for reduction of
the noise coming out from the industrial facilities.There are mainly two aspects in industrial
steam vent silencer one is the noise reduction and another is the flow consideration. The flow of
steam in the vent silencer is mainly from the inlet diffuser which is designed with multiple
number of holes through which the flow takes place. Detailed literature survey has shown that
there is a considerable variation in fluid flow pattern inside the steam vent silencer by differing
the number of holes and also diameter of holes in the inlet diffuser. This study aims at running
the CFD simulation for the steam vent silencer for different number of holes and diameter and
hence finding an optimized design for the inlet diffuser for the flow to take place smoothly and
henceforth reducing the noise, since we know turbulent flows creates noise.
The steam vent silencer model is generated using CATIA V5 R20, pre-processing
is carried out using ANSYS WORKBENCH and CFX SOLVER is used for simulation. The vent
silencer discussed here is those for a large flow rate, high velocity, high pressure and high
temperature used in power plants.The turbulence model used is k-epsilon.
Keywords:Diffuser, Vent Silencer, Flow Pattern, k-epsilon Turbulence model.
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INTRODUCTION

SOUND is both a physical phenomenon and the sensation of hearing. By definition, Noise is
unwanted sound. One person’s sound, rock music, for example, can be another person’s noise
[1]
Excessive noise can be both objectionable and hazardous; hence there is a need to reduce the

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 International Journal of Advanced Scientific and Technical Research Issue 3 volume 4, July-August 2013
Available online on http://www.rspublication.com/ijst/index.html ISSN 2249-9954

noise coming out from any facility. In our case as the noise is coming out from the industrial
facilitieslike steam vents, safety relief valve outlets etc, hencevent silencers are used for the noise
reduction. Thesevent silencers reduce the noise generated by the expansion of steam from
elevated pressures to atmospheric pressures.These are absorptive silencers used to suppress noise
generated by high velocity gas streams such as steam vents, safety relief valve outlets, system
blow downs and purge outlets etc[2].There are two considerations in the industrial vent silencer
one is the noise reduction and another is the flow consideration[3], for any silencer to work
effectively the flow through the silencer should be smooth and laminar, the flow in the silencer
takes place through the pressurized inlet diffuser which is designed with multiple number of
holes to break up the large jet stream of gas into many small jets and provide energy
dissipation[3], the characteristics of flow into the silencer is mainly decided through these holes
hence there is a need to design the silencer with optimum number of holes and diameter so as to
get the flow as smooth as possible. According to the paper entitled “steam silencer” by M.I.
Carlos A. Miranda Herrera[4],equal flow is assumed in all the holes. Because of this, the speed
will be reduced in each hole and this will produce a lower Reynoldsnumber Re (less turbulence).
In the previous design of the silencer the flow through the diffuser was turbulent due to which
there was an inefficiency of the silencer. An attempt is made in this project to try to reduce the
turbulent nature of the flow by trying to optimize the design of the diffuser to get a smooth flow.

DESIGN

The overall size of a vent silencer is directly proportional to the desired noise reduction and the
flow rate of the particular gas[5]. Noise reduction depends on the silencer length, while the
diameter of the silencer depends on the gas flow rate. These silencers can range from 12 inches
up to 12 feet in diameter. In our case the length and the diameter is given for the particular flow
rate. A typical vent silencer designed in CATIA for the analysis purpose in this study is shown in
figure below

1 2 3

Figure 1 shows the CATIA designed model of the vent silencer

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 International Journal of Advanced Scientific and Technical Research Issue 3 volume 4, July-August 2013
Available online on http://www.rspublication.com/ijst/index.html ISSN 2249-9954

The three principal components of the vent silencer are the 1) Pressurized Inlet Diffuser, 2)
Plenum Section and 3) Acoustic Tube Module as shown in Figure 1. Each component
accomplishes diffusion and smoothing of the flow and an overall reduction of noise.

DESIGN REQUIREMENTS

 Stay away from sonic flow and have a moderate speed.

 Designing the holes of moderate size because if the holes are too small the speed will be
increased and the system may collapse, on the other hand if the holes are too big there
will be no pressure drop.
 No concentrically designed holes.

FLOW ANALYSIS

The three-dimensional geometry model of the vent silencer is created using a 3D

modelingsoftware package(CATIA V5 R20) as shown in Fig 1.Then the geometry is meshed
using3D tetragonalfinite volume based elementsin the ANSYS CFX MESHER, and the
simulations are carried out using the commercial finite volumebased CFD package,ANSYS CFX
SOLVER. The standard k-epsilon model is used for simulation of turbulent flow.

The main dimensions of the silencer in mmare:

Length: 2336.8
Height: 762
Diameter: 762
Diffuser dia: 406.4

The Flow conditions are:

Fluid: Steam
Design pressure: Atmospheric pressure
Design temperature: 1800C
Flow rate: 8 kg/sec
Walls: no slip walls.

RESULTS & DISCUSSION

The CFD simulations are carried out for the silencer with different designs of the pressurized
inlet diffuser whose results are shown below:

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 International Journal of Advanced Scientific and Technical Research Issue 3 volume 4, July-August 2013
Available online on http://www.rspublication.com/ijst/index.html ISSN 2249-9954

Figure 2 shows the stream lines for 24 holes ofFigure 3a shows the streamlines for 24 holes of
30mm dia 30 mm dia

.
Figure 3b shows the streamline for diffuser Figure 4 shows the streamline for diffuser with 24
16 holes of 45mm dia holes of 45mm dia

Based on simulated results, the velocity streamline for the old design of the silencer with 24
number of holes of 30 mm diameter is shown in Figure 2, wherein the flow through the diffuser
is turbulent in nature as can be seen from the figure. Henceforth in order to reduce this
turbulence different designs of the diffuser are tried. Results of some of the designs simulated are
shown above, first the design of the silencer with 16 number of holes of 30 mm dia on the
diffuser is tried whose result is shown in the figure 3a. This design did not gave satisfactory
result hence was not suitable for design. Figure 3b shows another design of the silencer with 16
number of holes of 45 mm diameter on the diffuser, the results from this design was
comparatively better than the previous designs but still were not satisfactory. At last the design
of the silencer with 24 number of holes of 45 mm diameter gave satisfactory result with less
turbulent flow as shown in figure 4 and also with higher noise reduction as shown in the results
of the SIDLAB noise simulation software below.

SIDLAB NOISE SIMULATIONRESULTS.

SIDLAB is a1D sound propagation simulation software for complex duct networks. It is based
on the two-port theory and compiles a long experience and knowledge of using similar codes for
all types of duct acoustic applications in research, teaching and consulting. SIDLAB calculates
Transmission Loss for all the silencer designs and hence gives an comparison as to which is a
better design with higher Transmission Loss. Sound Transmission loss is defined as the
logarithmic ratio of the incident sound power on one side of the barrier( or partition) to the sound
transmitted to the other side, higher the Transmission Loss better the design. The results of the
Transmission loss are given below.
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 International Journal of Advanced Scientific and Technical Research Issue 3 volume 4, July-August 2013
Available online on http://www.rspublication.com/ijst/index.html ISSN 2249-9954

Figure 5Transmission Loss for present silencer Figure Transmission Loss for silencer
with 16 holes of 30mm dia with 24 holes of 30mm dia

Figure 7Transmission Loss for silencer Figure 8: Transmission loss result for silencer
16 holes of 45mm dia. with 24 holes of 45 mm dia.

As we can see from the above 4 Figures, the results for the silencer with 24 number of holes of
45 mm diameter gave higher Transmission Loss of about 40 dB which is higher compared to all
other designs which gave a Transmission loss of about 25 to 30 dB.hence we can say the design
of the silencer with 24 number of holes of 45 mm dia is a better design for the vent silencer.

CONCLUSION

The objective of this project was to run the simulations for the steam vent silencer with different
designs of the pressurized inlet diffuser and find the optimum design for it with different number
of holes with different diameter, CFX Solver was used to run the simulations, the results
obtained shows the design of the pressurized inlet diffuser with 24 number of holes of 45 mm

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 International Journal of Advanced Scientific and Technical Research Issue 3 volume 4, July-August 2013
Available online on http://www.rspublication.com/ijst/index.html ISSN 2249-9954

diameter gave satisfactory results with flows from the diffuser to the plenum section taking place
smoothly and with less turbulence and also the Transmission loss for the design was around 40
dB which is higher comparted to all other designs. Hence the design of the diffuser with 24 holes
of 45 mm diameter is recommended for the design.

FUTURE PROSPECTIVE

In this project the design of the diffuser with different number of holes and diameter is taken into
account for optimizing the design of the diffuser, furthermore in future the design of the diffuser
with different length and diameter can be studied for better optimization of the silencer.
Furthermore in these simulations only standard k-epsilon turbulence model is used but in future
SST k-omega, realizable k-epsilon turbulence model can be used for better result and a
validation of simulation result to experiment data can also be done.

REFERENCES

1. Silencer Applications by UNIVERSAL Silencers Co.

2. UNIVERSAL vent silencer – a report by universal co.
3. Flow Considerations in Industrial Silencer Design by George Feng, Vadim Akishin and
Bruce Huyn.
4. Steam silencers by M.I. Carlos A. Miranda Herrera
5. PULSCO vent silencer- a report by pulsco co.
6. Dr. S. RajaduraiSuresh Natarajan and N.Manikandan’ s“Muffler Pre-Processing
Methodology and Comparative Study”
7. Middelberg, Barber, T.J., Leong, S. S., Byrne, K.P and Leonardi, E’s. “Computational
Fluid Dynamics Analysis Of The Acoustic Performance Of Various Simple Expansion
Chamber Mufflers”
8. C.J. Deschampsa, F.C. Possamaib and E.L.L. Pereira’s“numerical simulation of pulsating
flow in Suction mufflers”
9. V. KoteswaraRao, Mahesh S. Murthy, S. Arumuga Raja &Dattu Kumar’s“CFD
(Computational Fluid Dynamics) technique to study the suction gas flow through the
suction muffler”
10. Sanjay s. gosavi, Vinayak m. juge, Mayur m. nadgouda’s“Optimization of Suction
Muffler Using Taguchi’s DOE method”
11. George Feng,VadimAkishin, “Aerodynamic aspects for designing industrial acoustic
silencers”
12. H.Maheshappa, V.K.Pravin, K.S.Umesh, P.H.Veena’s “Simulation of the Design of an
Exhaust Silencer Stack by CFD”
13. Shital Shah Saisankaranarayana K, Kalyankumar S. Hatti Prof. D. G.Thombare’s “A
Practical Approach towards Muffler Design, Development and Prototype Validation”
14. Lee Ming Wong G. Gary Wang’s “Development of an automatic design and
optimizationsystem for industrial silencers”
15. Ar-15 Reflex Sound Suppressor Modeling And Testingby Christopher Gingrich Daniel
Emery Ricky Lynch.

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