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Flow strongly affects the propagation of acoustics wave transmission within a duct and this must be addressed by the vibro-acoustic modelling of duct systems subject to non-uniform flow. Flow impacts both the effective sound propagation speed in a duct and refracts the sound towards or away from the duct walls depending on whether the acoustic waves are propagating in the direction of the flow or against the flow. Accurate modeling of the acoustic propagation within a duct is crucial for design and “tuning” of muffler systems that need to strongly attenuate narrowband acoustic sources from the engine. Muffler systems that may avoid matching acoustic resonances to engine narrowband sources when no flow is present may experience shifting of resonances to frequencies that match engine sources and cause problems when the flow during a real operating condition is present.

Speech transmissibility is a critical factor in the design of public address systems for passenger cabins in trains, aircraft and coaches. Speech transmissibility is primarily affected by the direct field, early low order reflections, and late reflections (reverberation) of the source. The direct and low order reflections are affected by the relative location of speakers and seats as well as the acoustic properties of the reflecting walls. To properly capture these early reflections, measures of speech transmissibility typically require time domain information. However, another important factor for speech transmissibility is background noise due to broadband exterior sources such as a flow noise sources. The background noise is typically modeled with broadband steady state assumptions such as in statistical energy analysis (SEA). This works presents an efficient method for predicting speech transmissiblity by combining ray tracing with SEA.