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Component sound quality is an important factor in the design of competitive diesel engines. One component noise that causes complaints is the gear rattle that originates in the front-of-engine gear train which drives the fuel pump and other accessories. The rattle is caused by repeated tooth impacts resulting from fluctuations in differential torsional acceleration of the driving gears. These impacts generate a broadband, impulsive noise that is often perceived as annoying. In most previous work, the overall sound quality of diesel engines has been considered without specifically focusing on predicting the perception of gear rattle. Gear rattle level has been quantified based on angular acceleration measurements, but those measurements can be difficult to perform. Here, the emphasis was on developing a metric based on subjective testing of the perception of gear rattle.

Hip joint location (H-point) is an important design specification used by car seat manufacturers. Since most of the modern car seats are full-foam seats, the H-point location is primarily dependent on the quasi-static behavior of foam which is a highly nonlinear and viscoelastic material. In this work, a constitutive model is developed for flexible polyurethane foam. The stiffness characteristics of foam are described by a polynomial in displacement and the viscoelastic behavior is described by a convolution of the response with a kernel which is assumed to be a sum of exponentials. A system identification procedure, based on linear least squares fitting and ARMA modeling, is developed to identify the parameters from data collected in quasi-static foam experiments.