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The demands for comfort and a cleaner environment have been increasing for the past years for motorcycle as well as car manufacturers. With the need to decrease the time-to-market, there is a clear drive to apply CAE-based methods in order to evaluate new designs and to propose design changes that solve any identified problems. More specifically, the demands on the comfort of the rider are not only related to ride & handling and vibration levels(1), but also to the noise levels generated by the motorcycle. This paper presents the virtual modeling of one-cylinder engine of a motorcycle that identifies the mechanism behind the generation of an annoying noise. Furthermore, different possible design changes were evaluated in order to solve the problem. A combined experimental and numerical approach was followed to achieve this. Experiments were used to identify important parameters that determine the engine behavior and thus are critical for the modeling of such an engine.

One of the objectives in the European Research project TINO is to identify, in detail, the surfaces of a rotating tire which actually generate the radiated noise. The approach is completely experimental and is based upon the ASQ (Airborne Sound Quantification) technique. The quantification of the contribution of the different tire surfaces to the sound pressure measured under defined conditions is carried out through a process of near-field measurements during rotation of the tire and static acoustic transfer function measurements. The ASQ method is further developed and tested when focussing at the applications. In first instance, the procedure has been validated and fine-tuned under well-controlled boundary conditions at a tire chassis dynamometer. The results of this first investigation served also as a “reference” set of data which has been used for verification and validation of numerical tire models.

This paper describes more in detail the methodology, the measurements and the results of the ASQ method. The Airborne Sound Quantification method aims at identifying the acoustical contribution of the different body panels surrounding a cavity. The contribution of different body panels is the product of the acoustical strength (or volume velocity) of each panel with the corresponding acoustic transfer function between the panel and the interior microphone position. These volume velocities are the product of the corresponding normal velocity and the surface. The normal velocity has been measured by means of accelerometers attached to the different subpanels. In the next step, the acoustical FRF's are measured in an indirect way using the reciprocity principle. This means that the pressure response at all the subpanels is measured when the acoustical excitation takes place at the target interior noise microphone position. A high quality low frequency sound source has been used.

The subjective quality of sounds is a topic of increasing importance in the automotive industry. The first consideration is to describe the perceptual characteristics of this quality by means of jury tests or appropriate metrics. Once a NVH problem is determined in terms of an appropriate Sound Quality description, an in-depth analysis of the underlying physical phenomena must be made and engineering solutions newel to be proposed and validated This involves: • the detailed analysis of the signal structure in the time, frequency and order domain and identifying the signal Components Critical to the relevant sound quality dimension • the Correlation of the critical signal components to specific sources noise or vibration transmission paths and vibro-acoustic system characteristics. Ultimately this should lead to the prediction of the effect of feasible modifications in sound quality terms through the use of engineering models.