The Future of NVH Research - A Challenge by New Powertrains 2010-36-0515

Sound quality of vehicles has become very important for car manufacturers. This feature is interpreted as among the most relevant factors regarding perceived product quality. Since the development cycles in the automotive industry are constantly reduced to meet the customers' demands and to react quickly to market needs, ensuring product sound quality is becoming increasingly difficult. Moreover, new drive and fuel concepts, tightened ecological specifications, increase of vehicle classes and increasing diversification, etc., challenge the acoustic engineers trying to create and preserve a pleasant, adequate, harmonious passenger cabin sound. Another aspect concerns the general pressure for reducing emission and fuel consumption, which lead to vehicle weight reductions through material changes also resulting in new noise and vibration conflicts.

Furthermore, in the context of alternative powertrains and engine concepts, the new objective is to detect and implement the vehicle sound tailored to suit the auditory expectations and needs of the target group. But, what are appropriate sounds for hybrid or electric vehicles? To answer this question and to allow coping with the growing expectations regarding the acoustical comfort, advanced methods and tools are necessary. To guarantee high quality standards, it is imperative to have detailed and reliable information about NVH issues in early design phases. This requires the use of sophisticated simulation techniques, which offer the virtual construction and testing of subsystems and/or the whole car in early development stages. The virtual testing is very important especially with respect to alternative drive concepts (hybrid cars, electric cars, hydrogen fuel cell cars), where new NVH problems and challenges occur which have to be adequately managed right from the beginning. The paper highlights modern and innovative NVH measurement technologies and presents solutions of recent NVH tasks and challenges. Furthermore, future prospects and developments in the field of automotive acoustics are considered and discussed.