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Off-highway equipment operates in residential communities and must meet their radiated noise targets to be compliant with noise regulations and to be competitive in the marketplace. Traditional find and fix noise testing of late-stage prototype designs may cause launch delays, with intense time pressures that often result in missed opportunities to create excellent products with good value. Accurate simulation of noise from these machines allows noise targets to be assessed at each stage of product development, giving engineers time to develop low noise products without adding excessive manufacturing cost. Simulation of an early prototype of a new vacuum excavator showed excessive levels of radiated noise in two different frequency ranges. Further investigation of the simulation results of these two spectrum ranges indicated different noise mechanisms producing the excessive noise levels.

Design and evaluation of construction equipments and vehicles in the construction industry constitute a very important but expensive and time consuming part of the engineering process on account of large number of variants of prototypes and low production volumes associated with each variant. In this article, we investigate an alternative approach to the hardware testing based design process by implementing a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation based methodology that has the potential to reduce the cost and time of the entire design process. The simulation results were compared with test data and good agreement was observed between test data and simulation.