As the legislation for pass-by noise (PBN) has recently become more stringent, car manufacturers face again a challenging task to reach the new SPL objective (70dB(A)). A good design of the engine bay is therefore required to sufficiently attenuate the noise coming from sources as the engine and the intake. This involves proper design of the engine bay's panels including apertures, and a good selection of the type and location of acoustic treatments.
For a given engine bay design, the PBN SPL results can be obtained with a PBN test or by an equivalent simulation. Using simulation models it is possible to create the perfect test environment virtually and moreover to obtain acoustic results for a large number of designs upfront of any actual testing or prototype. The challenge for simulation models is however that, as the results should typically be available from 20 Hz up to 4 or 5 kHz and overall SPL results should be retrieved from a narrow band response over this large frequency range, the CAE models required can become very large and many frequencies need to be computed resulting in long solving times.
This paper will discuss on Boundary Element Method (BEM) and Finite Element Method (FEM) acoustic technologies available to predict powertrain exterior Acoustic Transfer Functions (ATFs) for a mock-up model of an engine bay. A comparison with Test results is provided to judge on the models' accuracy. Special focus is given to a comparative performance study for the different simulation approaches.
