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One of the great challenges of the NVH development process is to ensure that customers and stakeholders in the vehicle team are involved in sound quality decision making throughout a new vehicle programme. Recent developments of interactive NVH simulators have enabled a cost-effective customer-focused method for capturing the opinions and decision making processes of people who are not NVH experts. This paper describes the latest enhancement to the NVH Simulator approach which allows the sounds of virtual vehicles to be evaluated whilst driving on-road. The sounds are created and presented to the driver in such a way that they appear totally natural and the assessor is not aware that they are synthesized. Since the subjective evaluations are performed on normal roads, key decision makers can understand, sign up with confidence to, and appreciate the value of the proposed sounds.

For sound simulations of a fixed driving condition a sound file format in one of the many accepted standard formats is more than acceptable. However, for real-time, driver-in-the-loop, simulations a single sound file is no longer adequate. Sounds for each physical component must be created in real-time from a collection of look-up tables or reference sounds. While these may still be represented as a collection of individual sound files the practical organizational and portability requirements dictate that the data would be better represented as a single sound object containing additional information on attributes of the collection and how it interfaces with the vehicle driving model. This paper discusses the various requirements of a simulator sound component and proposes an open standard for the interchange of components between systems.

Experiencing the results of virtual NVH analysis in an immersive physical simulation is the only accurate method of developing vehicle, system or component targets and designs. This paper describes an engineering approach specifically created to enable physical interaction with test, CAE and hybrid NVH models, at every stage in the vehicle design process from concept to full detail. It explains the need for sound and vibration decomposition and synthesis, and interactive sound and vibration replay. Implementation of this process has led to the development of engineering tools that enable Interactive NVH Simulation. The paper also describes the practical use an engineer can make of a ‘rapid prototyping’ desktop NVH simulator in the design process. A full scale NVH Simulator is then used to allow evaluation of final design alternatives under realistic driving conditions by non-specialists (i.e. the customer) as well as specialists.