Engine Noise Radiation - Prediction and Test Comparison

This paper presents a validation project carried out by the Ford Motor Company and Numerical Integration Technologies (NIT) concerning the numerical prediction of engine noise radiation.

The importance and the difficulty of building a structural model (predicting accurate vibration data) are discussed. A new methodology has been developed. This method consists of a modal expansion of experimental data and allows to introduce experimental vibration measurements in the numerical approach to enhance the quality of the predictions.

Provided that the structural behavior is correctly assessed, the project has shown that the BEM-based acoustic predictions agree remarkably well with test data.