Analysis of Door Seal Compression and its Influence on NVH Performance in Heavy-Duty Vehicle

This study focuses on the effect of door seal compression prediction and its impact on structure borne NVH in trucks. Customer perception of vibrations are envisaged as quality criteria. It is necessary to determine the contribution of seal stiffness due to seal compression under closed condition of the door rather than considering stiffness of the door seal under uncompressed conditions. The dynamic stiffness of door seal is determined from analysis of non-linear type. The simulations are built using the Mooney - Rivlin model. The parameters influencing the compression of door seals in both two – dimension and three – dimension, are identified from the analysis. This involves contemplating the appropriate seal mounted boundary condition on the body and the door of the vehicle. The stiffness after compression of seal is extracted from this non-linear analysis which is further used to obtain the vibration modes for the doors in the truck cabin. As a part of next step, the compressed seal stiffness value is used to analyze the operational vibration and structure borne cabin noise. The simulated results for modal performance including the effects of seal are validated with the experimental test data and are noticed to be in good agreement. The simulated result of models that were analyzed with the use of both uncompressed seal data and compressed seal data are compared for operational vibration, operational noise respectively. It is observed that the compressed seal stiffness has an impact on the structure borne NVH performance of the truck cabin.