Design Optimization of an Accumulator for Noise Reduction of Rotary Compressor

Recently, noise reduction in room air conditioners has been one of the important issues as well as cooling efficiency. The rotary compressor is the dominant noise source in an air conditioner. A number of studies have been conducted on reducing compressor noise through improving muffler and resonator design. However the noise from the accumulator, a noise delivering path between compressor and air conditioner, is not fully taken into consideration. The accumulator contains a large inner cavity, and usually generates additional resonance noise during operation. This paper aims to conduct an optimal design for reducing accumulator noise by maximizing the transmission loss within the target frequency range that represents high-order nonlinearity. Design of experiments and radial basis function neural network are used in the context of approximate meta-models, and genetic algorithm is used as an optimization tool.