MID-MOD · Mid-frequency vibro-acoustic modelling tools / Innovative CAE methodologies to strengthen European competitiveness

Noise and vibration have a very large impact on the competitiveness of transportation vehicles, not only driven by the increasing customer demand for vibro-acoustic comfort, but also by the tightening legal regulations regarding noise and vibration emissions and immissions. Since noise and vibration as functional performance attributes often conflict with other attributes, such as weight and CO2 emission, concurrent design and analysis procedures are required. Such processes involve multi-attribute optimisation and are facilitated by the use of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools. Also, there is an increasing trend towards virtual prototyping to reduce costs and development times. As a result, good CAE tools are essential in modern vehicle design. Ideally CAE tools would be applicable in the whole frequency range of interest, which is the audio-frequency range. In practice specific methods are applicable in a limited frequency region. A class of deterministic “low frequency” methods is both well developed and well established. At “high frequencies” energy based methods are valuable, but less well-established. There is however a “mid-frequency” gap in current modelling capabilities: too high for deterministic and too low for energy based tools. This is important, since it strongly affects product performance and competitiveness. The lack of CAE tools for mid-frequency issues forms the target for this collaborative project. In this project a well balanced consortium of both academic and industrial partners will develop robust CAE tools, applicable for the analysis of mid-frequency noise and vibration problems. In a second stage, these tools will be applied on industrial problems, filling the currently existing gap. A third important aspect of the project is the dissemination of mid-frequency analysis and modelling skills throughout the EU engineering community to spread crucial knowledge and skills in strengthening EU transportation vehicle competitiveness.