Analysis on the interactions of harmonics in exhaust pipes of automotive engines

In exhaust pipes of automotive engines, the pulsating pressure waves are composed of fundamental frequency and high order harmonics. The nonlinearities in the exhaust pipe is caused by their interactions. The error between prediction and measurement is induced by the nonlinearities. We can not explain this phenomenon using linear acoustics theory. So power spectrum, which is used in linear theory, is not useful. This paper is concerned with the development of useful engineering techniques to detect and analyze nonlinearity in exhaust pipe of automotive engines. The study of higher order statistics has been dominated by work on the bispectrum. The bispectrum can be viewed as a decomposition of the third moment (skewness) of a signal over frequency and as such is blind to symmetric nonlinearities. The phenomenon of quadratic phase coupling (QPC) can be analyzed by the bicoherence function. Finally the application of these techniques to data from actual exhaust pipe systems is performed.