Road Noise Prediction Assessment Using CAE Instead of Costly and Time Consuming Physical Tests

Virtual Product Development (VPD) with a vision to eliminate prototype testing is the recent trend in the automotive industry. Reducing the total vehicle development period with optimized output has been the major advantage of this new trend, fueled by increasing competition and shorter product life cycle. In this regard, Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) has taken a more significant role than ever in the vehicle development programs. Prediction of road noise in passenger cars is one of the important attributes to NVH (Noise Vibration Harness) Simulations. In the present work, CAE - NVH simulation of road noise is carried out on the finite element model of the vehicle, eliminating the costly and laborious test procedures & the process of awaiting information from various departments. One of the major challenges in these simulations are generating the load inputs for the structure-borne road noise in a cost and time saving method with accuracy. An alternative to the existing MBD/Test input method is explored in the present work. Enforced displacements in the frequency domain are generated using ISO 8608 standard road profiles and are used as input to the vehicle system. Time and cost of the total procedure is reduced drastically by this procedure with more than acceptable accuracy & correlation. The results are validated with the available test data & existing MBD CAE input methods of predicting the interior noise of the passenger cars.