Innovative Acoustic Material Concept Integration Into Vehicle Design Process

Integration of acoustic material concepts into vehicle design process is an important part of full vehicle design. The ability to assess the acoustic performance of a particular sound package component early in the design process allows designers to test various designs concepts before selecting a final products. This paper describes an innovative acoustic material concept which is easily integrated in a design process through the use of a database of Biot parameters. Biot parameters are widely used in the automotive industry to describe the physical interactions between the acoustics waves travelling through foams, fibers or metamaterials and the solid and fluid phase of these poro-elastic materials. This new acoustic material concept provides a combination of absorption, transmission loss and added damping on the panel it is attached to. It has shown unique vibro-acoustics performance when tested on a German car manufacturer flagship vehicle and provides the ability to reduce the space needed for sound package component compared with classical solutions.