Sound propagation in a steam generator: experimental and theoretical results

This Paper deals with sound propagation across tube bundles which are found in steam generators. A tube bundle is made up of a large number of periodically arranged tubes immersed in a liquid. Its acoustic transmission properties are examined experimentally and theoretically. The measured results of attenuation and propagation speed are presented. They show the stopping/passing band behaviour expected from periodic media and the transmission drop which occurs when an initially plane wave is diffracted in different directions. These observations can be explained theoretically with a single-frequency model. However, the predicted stopping-band values of the attenuation are much higher than the measured ones. This discrepancy no longer occurs when a multiple-frequency model is applied to simulate the tone bursts used in the experiments