Road Noise Prediction Assessment Using CAE Instead Of Costly And Time Consuming Physical Tests

Virtual Product Development (VPD) with a vision to eliminate prototype testing is the trend in automotive industry. Reducing the total vehicle development period with optimized output has been the major requirement of this new trend, fueled by increasing competition and shorter product life cycle. In this regard, Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) has taken more significant role than ever in the vehicle development programs. Prediction of road noise in passenger car is one of the important attribute to NVH Simulations. In the present work, CAE - NVH simulation of road noise is carried out on the Finite element model of the vehicle, eliminating the costly and laborious test procedures. An alternative to the existing MBD/Test input method is explored in this work. Generating the load inputs for the structure-borne road noise in a cost and time saving method with accuracy is one of the challenges in these simulations. Enforced displacements in the frequency domain are generated using ISO 8608 standard road profiles and are used as input to the vehicle system for FE Simulation. By this method, time and cost of the total procedure is reduced drastically with acceptable accuracy & correlation. The results are validated with the standard MBD/test input methods of predicting the road noise.