Road Noise TPA Simplification for Improving Vehicle Sensitivity to Tire Cavity Resonance Using Helium Gas

Transfer Path Analysis (TPA) is an established tool that can be used to determine path contributions for road noise transmission (e.g. suspension links, sub-frame bushings, etc.) in passenger vehicles. However, due to the large number of paths and the presence of multiple partially-correlated sources in a road noise problem, TPA can be nearly impractical to implement as an experimental diagnostic tool. A simplified approach to Road Noise TPA is desirable to reduce test and analysis times in this era of shortening development cycles. It has been previously established that helium gas can be used to significantly alter the frequency of a tire’s acoustic cavity resonance [1]. Helium is used to “eliminate” excitation sources at the frequencies of tire cavity resonances, thereby reducing the number of paths to consider and simplifying a complex multi-reference TPA down to a single-reference TPA problem. Experimental results of the structure-borne transfer paths from one vehicle suspension corner are correlated with full suspension Road Noise TPA results for procedure verification in this paper.