Operational Determination of Car Window Damping

Wind noise can be a significant event for automotive design engineers. The greenhouse glass plays an important role in the wind noise process. Robust estimates of the greenhouse glass damping are necessary for both understanding and modeling the role of the glass in the wind noise process. One unanswered question is whether the aerodynamic loads affect the window glass damping. To make this determination a method to assess the operational damping is required.

The civil engineering community uses the random decrement technique to assess operational damping due to wind loads. The random decrement technique has been shown to be a normalized autocorrelation function. In this paper the damping is estimated directly from the autocorrelation function. In the first section the relationship between the damping and autocorrelation function is examined for white noise excitation. A single oscillator is examined as the first case. Extension to higher modal densities is discussed. Finally application to a car window is presented. The window results were limited by signal to noise problems.