Noise prediction method development for crop feed mechanism

Off highway vehicles face challenges in terms of noise levels during the operating conditions due to the existence of many dynamic subsystems intended to perform the primary functions. Reducing the overall noise levels are extremely important to provide a quiet environment for the operator and higher productivity. Noise source ranking is a common practice used across the industry to identify the top noise sources. It is important to characterize the top noise sources and work on them to improve the noise performance through further design modifications. Dynamic loads are important to characterize the acoustic behavior of the system. It’s hard to measure the vibration loads and almost impossible to measure acoustic loads in the operational conditions. In such scenarios, test based TPA is used to calculate the vibration and acoustic loads. This paper describes how the analysis methodology is developed for characterization of a crop feed mechanism. Test based TPA method is used to calculate the structural and acoustic loads. Structural and noise transfer functions are calculated using Finite Element Method Adaptive Order.  A good agreement is achieved with test data which validates the virtual model. Test based TPA loads are used to predict the operational noise levels. Different modeling approaches are also discussed to achieve the correlation with test data. This validated model can be confidently used to improve the design further.