Design of new silencers for a screw compressor

Two screw compressors used for the recycling of waste gas showed high vibration in the discharge piping. To mitigate the vibration problems new silencers had to be designed. A great challenge was the large variation in operating conditions, especially the variation of the molecular weight of the gas. The silencer design consisted of resonators combined with acoustic absorption material. The paper describes some general aspects of pulsations in screw compressors. A field case is used to demonstrate different design evaluations such as one- and three-dimensional acoustic modeling, fluid-structure interaction, mechanical response, testing of absorption material and scale-model testing. After installation of the silencers, measurements showed that the silencers perform as expected