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Noise Vibration and Harshness (NVH) characteristics have become a key differentiator between “Good” vehicles and “Best-In-Class” vehicles. While all OEM's and most Tier 1 suppliers have on-site in-ground chassis dynamometers, a need was identified to design, develop and bring to market, a fully capable portable NVH full vehicle chassis system. The original concept entailed a device, which could be brought to the customer's location, be fully self contained, requiring no external power, and provide data acquisition using transducers that would not contact the vehicle. With traditional instrumentation taking several hours to install, non-contacting lasers would be used to provide significant timesaving, and prevent any possible damage to the vehicle from pinched wires. The new methodology should provide data acquisition in as little as 20 minutes. Analysis would be accomplished immediately following testing, with hard copies available before the next vehicle was ready to run.

Kalman filters have been employed very successfully in control and guidance systems since the sixties, with particular application to avionics and navigation. These filters can track accurately signals of known structure among noise and other signal components with different structure. This paper investigates the application of nonstationary Kalman filters to track harmonic components. This approach enables the analysis of harmonic components in signals even when the rate of change of frequency, or slew rate, is high. A Kalman filter formulation to track harmonic components in data records sampled with constant frequency is first reviewed. Particular attention is paid to the characteristics of the filters in terms of filter resolution and harmonic separation, as well as ability to handle higher slew rates. The applicability of the method is demonstrated for analyzing driveline harshness problem.