Over recent years, NVH refinement of engine is becoming increasingly important in buying decision and can significantly give competitive edge to the vehicle in market place. This paper deals with the development phase of a prototype engine in which a specific testing activity was carried out to improve the overall NVH behavior of the powertrain. In order to explain the optimization process in detail, a case study was described in this paper.
First, NVH targets of the engine were set via benchmark tests on existing competitive products. Then series of baseline tests, such as 1M sound pressure level test and noise source identification, were performed on the engine. Test results indicated that an obvious breathing vibration mode exist near the intake manifold, which radiates high level noise.
In order to achieve the NVH targets, a correlation validation was performed to find out the main reason that caused the vibration of intake manifold. And then its structure was optimized through CAE analysis to change its modal frequencies.
After the optimization work, the NVH performance of the engine was significantly improved.