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Durability assessment for suspension systems and vehicle structures requires loads on each component from different road profiles. If a new vehicle is to be assessed for durability early in the design phase, a prototype must be built and tested on proving grounds. This can be time consuming and expensive. A large number of design configurations are considered for designing new vehicles in the truck industry. However, the number of prototypes that can be built and tested will be limited. The only options would be to depend on generic load cases or to use a virtual method that can translate limited measurements to various configurations. Roush CAE has successfully implemented a method called virtual iterations to back calculate the road profiles from the CAE model of a vehicle that has been tested on the desired road tracks.

Road noise and speech intelligibility are becoming ever more important, irrespective of the vehicle size, due to vehicle refinement as well as connectivity with mobile communication equipment. With better aerodynamic designs, development of refined powertrains, and a tectonic shift from I.C. engine to electric motors, road noise and wind noise will become more apparent to the customer and hence will become a priority for automakers to refine their vehicles. This paper describes the efforts undertaken to identify the road noise paths and develop countermeasures for a compact SUV vehicle. A hybrid test/CAE approach was followed to improve road noise performance of this vehicle. This effort involved developing tire CAE models from physical hardware and creating synthesized road-load input from data taken on roads.