Improving Vehicle Body Structure NVH - An Experimental Approach

Body structure design and development is becoming more and more critical for noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) vehicle performance. Many body structure design alternatives are studied analytically and in hardware during a vehicle program. Because of design and fabrication time, body structure hardware development can be very expensive and extremely time consuming. Consequently, the use of experimental design techniques for vehicle NVH development are becoming more popular to bring quality products to the market faster.

This paper demonstrates how an experimental approach was used to develop the body structure. Initially, a hardware experiment was used to assess the effects of four parts groups for Body Chassis NVH. Then, to further study the major parts groups, a computational experiment was performed. The result of these two experiments (hardware and computational) was used to recommend design concepts which reduced interior noise levels and improved body chassis NVH.