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A portable in-vehicle NVH data acquisition and analysis system is required to support the product development timing necessary to be competitive in today's automotive market. The components of such a system should include rugged hardware and software to support NVH data acquisition and analysis for frequently performed tests. The system should be easy for the vehicle development engineers to operate while producing results with a high confidence level. Once the data has been measured and analyzed, the system should support automated reporting and databasing of the results. The availability of such a system would make it easy for the vehicle development engineers to perform standardized tests with standardized analysis and reporting. Such a system has been successfully developed at Ford Motor Company.

An objective measure of automatic transmission shift disturbance is an important tool in many phases of the vehicle design process. To be useful, the objective measure must be directly related to the human perception of shift severity. Although it has been generally agreed that the objective measure should be some function of the fluctuation of vehicle fore/aft motion during the shift, measures used in the past, such as peak acceleration and rate of change of acceleration, fail to accurately reflect human perception when comparing two vehicles with very different shift mechanisms. This paper examines a particular function, the vibration dose value (VDV), which has been used to quantify human reaction to numerous types of vibration. When applied to vehicle fore/aft acceleration during a transmission shift, this function produces a single output number proportional to the driver's sensation of the severity of the shift, regardless of the character of the acceleration signal.