A Computational Approach to Evaluate the Automotive Windscreen Wiper Placement Options Early in the Design Process 2013-01-1933

For most car manufacturers, wind noise from the greenhouse region has become the dominant high frequency noise contributor at highway speeds. Addressing this wind noise issue using experimental procedures involves high cost prototypes, expensive wind tunnel sessions, and potentially late design changes. To reduce the associated costs as well as development times, there is strong motivation for the use of a reliable numerical prediction capability early in the vehicle design process.

Previously, a computational approach that couples an unsteady computational fluid dynamics solver (based on a Lattice Boltzmann method) to a Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA) solver had been validated for predicting the noise contribution from the side mirrors. This paper presents the use of this computational approach to predict the vehicle interior noise from the windshield wipers, so that different wiper placement options can be evaluated early in the design process before the surface is frozen. In this study, this approach is applied on a production vehicle to predict the interior noise contribution for wipers on and off configurations and validated against wind tunnel test measurements. Prediction of noise sources on the windshield has been validated by comparing the wall pressure fluctuations on the windshield between the computational approach and the test measurements. Accurate prediction of both the exterior noise sources and the interior noise indicates that this approach can be used to make design decisions about wiper placement during the vehicle development process.