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With the increasing importance of electrified powertrains, electric motors and gear boxes become an important NVH source especially regarding whining noises in the high frequency range. Engine encapsulation noise treatments become often necessary and present some implementation, modeling as well as optimization issues due to complex environments with contact uncertainties, pass-throughs and critical uncovered areas. Relying purely on mass spring systems is often a too massive and relatively unefficient solution whenever the uncovered areas are dominant. Coverage is key and often a combination of hybrid backfoamed porous stiff shells with integral foams for highly complex shapes offer an optimized trade-off between acoustic performance, weight and costs.

With a carbon neutrality horizon in 2050 as target for the industry, the use of growing quantities of recycled and recyclable materials is key. “Greenflocks” chips urethane based poroelastic material coming from recycled PU mattresses, that are decontaminated, shredded, mixed with thermoplastic bi-component PET fibers as well as thermofixed with hot air ovens resulting in low Volatile Organic Component (VOC) and odors, seems to be a good candidate. Indeed, one gets a 80 % recycled poroelastic material, 100% recyclable, with mechanical and acoustical properties allowing between 10 % and 20 % weight reduction compared to shoddy cotton felt typically depending on the density. Indeed, this “Greenflocks” material presents excellent mechanical decoupling properties even at high densities for the low thickness areas above 150 kg/m3 and up to 300 kg/m3 typically with a Young’s modulus kept below 150 kPa.

Whenever the noise source level or the expected acoustic comfort increases for diesel engines for example or for premium petrol vehicles, the required weight per unit area can be specified above 2000 g/m2 for the equivalent barrier of a mixed absorbing-insulating noise treatment. For an ABA foam/heavy layer/felt insulator, this is not a big issue, one has to increase the intermediate heavy layer weight. For hybrid stiff compressed felt backfoamed standard technologies, going above 2000 g/m2 is critical due to absorption properties loss following much too high airflow resistances and progressive porosity loss (above 250 kg/m3) as well as too high bending stiffness presenting resonant modes progressively and assembly manipulation issues. Last but not least, compressed felts begin to present too high costs at these weights against those of the heavy layers of ABA systems.

The lightweighting research on noise treatments since years tends to prove the efficiency of the combination of good insulation with steep insulation slopes with broadband absorption, even in the context of bad passthroughs management implying strong leakages. The real issue lies more in the industrial capacity to adapt the barrier mass per unit area to the acoustic target from low to high segment or from low petrol to high diesel sources, while remaining easy to manipulate. The hybrid stiff insulator family can realize this easily with hard felts barriers backfoamed weighting from 800 g/m2 to 2000 g/m2 typically with compressions below 10 mm. Above these equivalent barrier weights and traditional compressions of 7 mm for example, the high density of the felts begins to destroy the open porosity and thus the absorption properties (insulation works anyway here, whenever vibration modes do not appear due to too high stiffness…).