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The noise treatments weight reduction strategy, which consists in combining broadband absorption and insulation acoustic properties in order to reduce the weight of barriers, depends strongly on surface to volume ratio of the absorbing layers in the reception cavity. Indeed, lightweight technologies like the now classical Absorber /Barrier /Absorber layup are extremely efficient behind the Instrument Panel of a vehicle, but most of the time disappointing when applied as floor insulator behind the carpet. This work aims at showing that a minimum of 20 mm equivalent “shoddy” standard cotton felt absorption is requested for a floor carpet insulator, in order to be able to reduce the weight of barriers. This means that a pure absorbing system that would destroy completely the insulation properties and slopes can only work, if the noise sources are extremely low in this specific area, which is seldom the case even at the rear footwells location.

In order to reach the new 2020 CO2 emissions regulations, we have developed a wide range of lightweight noise treatment technologies going from pure absorbing to highly insulating ones, depending on the pass-through quality situation. This Generalized Light-Weight Concepts family was first optimized using the 2D Transfer Matrix Method (TMM) combined with quick SEA approaches. Taking into account thickness 3D maps with TMM is an efficient and quick intermediate “2,5D” optimization method, but it is not a real 3D approach. This work presents a new 3D optimization procedure based on poroelastic finite elements including intermediate cavities (like Instrument Panels) for designing these Generalized Light-Weight Concepts. A parallel reflection deals with products and processes in order to check the feasibility of the resulting 3D optimized insulator designs.

Strategies for weight reduction have driven the noise treatment advanced developments with a great success considering the already mastered weight decreases observed in the last years in the automotive industry. This is typically the case for all soft trims parts. In the early 2010's a typical european B-segment car soft trims weights indeed 30 to 40% less than in the early 2000's years. The main driver behind such a gap has been to combine insulation and absorption properties on a single part while increasing the number of layers. This product-process evolution was conducted using a significant improvement in the simulation capacities. In that sense, several studies presenting very good correlation results between Transmission Loss measurements and finite elements simulations on dashboard or floor insulators were presented. One may consider that those kinds of parts have already achieved a considerable improvement in performance.