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An average luxury car contains more than 50 sensors connected, to over 28 microprocessors, through multiple communication networks. What makes these complex machines diagnosable at a dealership, is the ability of sophisticated diagnostics algorithms. Besides use of diagnostics in service, diagnosing a failure is also key for functional safety and vehicle availability. Safety related diagnostic functions such as loss of Brake fluid and leaky fuel system detection are critical. Once a failure is detected, Vehicle availability functions extend vehicle operation, so that one could reach the dealership without being stranded. The number of failure modes in a car could far exceed tens of thousands, thereby identifying key failure modes that require diagnostics can be a challenge.

This paper presents a model of Total Vehicle Vibration Isolation (TVVI) system for vibration analysis and optimization. The TVVI system can handle any number of flexible and rigid components, frequency independent and frequency dependent parameters of spring-damper subsystems, and considers motion with all six degrees of freedom. The modal mass, stiffness, and damping of the eigenvectors of finite-element (FE) model of the flexible components are included in the total vehicle model, instead of the original FE model. This procedure reduces the number of degree of freedom (DOF) of total vehicle model, so that the practical optimization including large FE model can be performed. Optimization module includes various options of objective functions (six kinds of energy and ride quality) for different design goals. Applications of TVVI include cars, buses trucks or any structure where NVH is an issue.