In the design of recreational vehicle alternators, a particular challenge arises from marketing and engineering teams' desire to ensure that their products meet “best in class” sound quality characteristics. Furthermore, it is desirable to know these characteristics in measurable engineering terms in the product design stage, preferably before prototypes are built and tested. However, the aim of this paper is to investigate experimentally the electromagnetic sound quality characteristics of a vehicle alternator with the view of determination. For this reason, a special test rig was designed to simulate the alternator electromagnetic noise source. The results indicate that significant information can be obtained for this source. This can be an effective way to control this generated noise and consequently improve the vehicle alternator sound quality and look promising.
