Evaluation of Automotive Closure Design for High Frequency Acoustics Performance

A good Noise, Vibration, and Harshness (NVH) environment in a vehicle plays an important role in attracting a large customer base in the automotive market. Hence, NVH has been given significant priority while considering automotive design. NVH performance is monitored using simulations early during the design phase and testing in later prototype stages in the automotive industry. Meeting NVH performance targets possesses a greater risk related to design modifications in addition to the cost and time associated with the development process. Hence, a more enhanced and matured design process involves Design Point Analysis (DPA), which is essentially a decision-making process in which analytical tools derived from basic sciences, mathematics, statistics, and engineering fundamentals are used to develop a product model that better fulfills the predefined requirement. This paper shows the systematic approach of conducting a Design Point Analysis-level NVH study to evaluate the acoustic performance of vehicle door systems in terms of transmission loss. This is a very important and useful effort by the design team to avoid the risk of later design changes in automotive door systems for better NVH performance. Statistical energy analysis is used for setup and prediction of transmission loss across a wide frequency range up to 10000 Hz. Various design parameters for vehicle door systems are studied to evaluate their impact on transmission loss and NVH performance.