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Improving fuel efficiency often affects NVH performance. Modifying a vehicle’s design in the latter stages of development to improve NVH performance is often costly. Therefore, to optimize the cost performance, a Multi-Attribute Balancing (MAB) approach should be employed in the early design phases. This paper proposes a solution based on a unified 1D system simulation model across different vehicle performance areas. In the scope of this paper the following attributes are studied: Fuel economy, Booming, Idle, Engine start and Drivability. The challenges to be solved by 1D simulation are the vehicle performance predictions, taking into account the computation time and accuracy. Early phase studies require a large number of scenarios to evaluate multiple possible parameter combinations employing a multi-attribute approach with a systematic tool to ease setup and evaluation according to the determined performance metrics.

The increasing pressure on fuel economy has brought car manufacturers to implement solutions that improve vehicle efficiency, such as downsized engines, cylinder deactivation and advanced torque lock-up strategies. However, these solutions have a major drawback in terms of noise and vibration comfort. Downsized engines and lock-up strategies lead to the use of the engine at lower RPMs, and the reduced number of cylinders generates higher torque irregularities. Since the torque generated by the engine is transferred through flexible elements (clutch, torsional damper, gearbox, transmission, tire), these also impact the energy that is transferred to the vehicle body and perceived by the driver. This phenomenon leads to low frequency behavior, for instance booming noise and vibration. This paper presents a combined test and CAE modelling approach (1D/3D) to reverse engineer a vehicle equipped with a CPVA (centrifugal pendulum vibration absorber).

Shift quality of a gearbox is one of the most important items contributing to the overall subjective impression of driving comfort for a vehicle with a manual transmission. Often the transmission is the only point of attention for shift quality issues with a focus on the synchronizer being the main area of optimization. This is however not always sufficient. What the driver feels at the gear lever is a result of the interaction between the gear lever, the selector system, the transmission internals and the driveline. For most of these subsystems, well established models are available which can be used in early development to get a first idea of the shift quality. However, accurately representing the physical feel of the transmission cable, connecting the gearbox and the shifter, remains a challenge.

This paper describes a practical approach to extract the global static stiffness of a body in white (BIW) from dynamic measurements in free-free conditions. Based on a limited set of measured frequency response functions (FRF), the torsional and bending stiffness values are calculated using an FRF based substructuring approach in combination with inverse force identification. A second approach consists of a modal approach whereby the static car body stiffness is deduced from a full free-free modal identification including residual stiffness estimation at the clamping and load positions. As an extra important result this approach allows for evaluating the modal contribution of the flexible car body modes to the global static stiffness values. The methods have been extensively investigated using finite element modeling data and verified on a series of body in white measurements.