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The pressure to shorten vehicle product development time-to-launch means more in-lab tests must be performed earlier, and before vehicle prototypes are available for road or test track evaluations. Squeak and Rattle (S&R) evaluations of subsystems/modules and components must be performed using realistic road excitation conditions. How S&R performance degrades as the vehicle, module or component accumulates customer miles or kilometers must be assessed before the design is frozen. Durability tests must be performed earlier in the design/development timeline as well. All these pressures point to having a systematic, disciplined and streamlined methodology or protocol for acquiring and processing road vibration data useful for S&R and durability tests.

Engineers doing squeak and rattle testing of instrument panels (IP's) have successfully used large electrodynamic vibration systems to identify sources of squeaks and rattles (S&R's). Their successes led to demands to test more IP's, i.e., to increase throughput of IP's to reflect the many design, material, and/or manufacturing process changes that occur, and to do so at any stage of the development, production, or QA process. What is needed is a radically different and portable way to find S&R's in a fraction of the time and at lower capital cost without compromising S&R detection results.