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The Noise Vibration and Harshness (NVH) characteristics and requirements of vehicles are changing as the automotive manufacturers turn their focus from developing and producing cars propelled by internal combustion engines (ICE) to electrified vehicles. This new strategic orientation enables them to offer products that are more efficient and environmentally friendly. Although electric powertrains have many advantages compared to their established predecessors they also bring new challenges that increase the difficulty of matching the high quality requirements of premium car producers especially regarding NVH. Electric motors are one of the most important sources of vibrations in electric vehicles.

The flexibility in design offered by advanced additive manufacturing technologies makes these processes more and more attractive for automotive and aircraft applications and, also, for the production of safety relevant metal components. The high strength, thermally resistant nickel-based alloy Inconel®718 is widely used by the aircraft industry and its low level of machinability makes it an optimal candidate for AM technologies. The challenge, together with improving the process, is now to build the path that will bring AM technologies from rapid prototyping to series production. Therefore, it is essential to investigate additively manufactured materials and the effect that subsequent processing, such as, for example surface preparation, has on their properties. Furthermore, while the static properties of additively manufactured Inconel®718 have already been investigated, this work aims to describe its cyclic stress-strain behavior, which can be used for fatigue assessment.

Model Order Reduction (MOR) methods such as Component Mode Synthesis (CMS) have been used in order to simulate large linear dynamic systems for many years and have reached a considerable level of saturation. These reduction methods have many advantages such as minimizing computational costs but also have restrictions. One of their disadvantages is that material damping characteristics can only be defined in form of Rayleigh damping. Another disadvantage is that the reduced order model can only represent one state of the structure determined in the generation process of the reduced matrices. In this paper we present a way to consider material damping in reduced matrices that contain one or more materials having different damping characteristics without the disadvantages of using Rayleigh damping.

In the last years the research activities in the field of lightweighting have been advancing rapidly. The introduction of innovative materials and manufacturing technologies has allowed significant weight reduction. Despite this, novel technologies and materials have not reached a wide distribution. The reasons for this are mainly high production costs and environmental impacts of manufacturing that do not compensate benefits during operation. The paper deals with the AffordabLe LIghtweight Automobiles AlliaNCE (ALLIANCE) project which has the goal of developing novel advanced automotive materials and production technologies, aiming at an average 25% weight reduction over 100 k units/year, at costs of <3 €/kg. The article is focussed on Work Package 1 (WP1) of the project, aimed at estimating the full attributes of innovative design solutions by assessing costs, energy demand and GWP over the entire vehicle Life Cycle (LC).

The automotive industry is aiming at both reducing the weight of the vehicles while improving a high level of comfort. This causes contradicting requirements for the systems used for noise and vibration control. Thus, active systems are investigated which may enhance the performance of passive noise and vibration control in vehicles without adding excessive weight. In this paper, basic principles for the implementations of those systems with a focus on the control systems are reviewed. Examples from implementations in automotive applications are presented, including control of engine vibrations, structure borne noise transmitted from the road into the passenger compartment and low-frequency chassis vibrations. Based on adaptive filter systems already widely used in active noise control adaptation of the control algorithms to the specific application scenarios are discussed.