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The assessment of the Transmission Loss (TL) of vehicle components at Low-Mid Frequencies generally raises difficulties associated to the physical mechanisms of the noise transmission through the automotive panel. As far as testing is concerned, it is common in the automotive industry to perform double room TL measurements of component baffled cut-outs, while numerical methods are rather applied when prototype or hardware variants are not available. Indeed, in the context of recent efforts for reduction of vehicle prototypes, the use of simulation is constantly challenged to deliver reliable means of decision during virtual design phase. While the Transfer matrix method is commonly and conveniently used at Mid-High frequencies for the calculation of a trimmed panel, the simulation of energy transfer at low frequencies must take into account modal interactions between the vehicle component and the acoustic environment.

Typically, in the automotive industry, the design of the body damping treatment package with respect to NVH targets is carried out in such a way to achieve panel mobility targets, within given weight and cost constraints. Vibration mobility reduction can be efficiently achieved thanks to dedicated CAE FE tools, which can take into account the properties of damping composites, and also, which can provide their optimal location on the body structure, for a minimal added mass and a maximized efficiency. This need has led to the development of different numerical design and optimization strategies, all based on the modeling of the damping composites by mean of equivalent shell representations, which is a versatile solution for the full vehicle simulation with various damping layouts.

To solve interior rolling noise issues after vehicle development has been finalized, a robust procedure is desired, which combines the strengths of both the experimental and the simulation world. This paper proposes a methodology that is focused on rolling noise issues in the frequency range from 100 to 600Hz and whose core is constituted by a source identification procedure. By means of an inverse method that makes use of the information coming from several microphones, each of the interior areas of the passenger compartment walls is identified as an equivalent source and one can then determine which one is the most contributing to the interior noise under operating condition. This allows a direct and optimized application of countermeasures aimed at the reduction of the interior rolling noise.

In automotive acoustics, body NVH design is traditionally carried out without considering the acoustic trim parts. Nevertheless, the vibro-acoustic interaction of body structure and insulation trim cannot be neglected in the middle frequency range, where structure borne propagation might still be dominating and where classical statistical approaches are generally not able to represent the influence of local changes in stiffness and damping. This, together with the market requirement of lightweight and more efficient sound package solutions, is leading the CAE engineers to evaluate new design approaches dedicated to vehicle components such as dash or floor systems, for which the multi-physics interaction between damping, body stiffness and trim impedance is important.

Due to the pressure on CO₂ reduction, during the last years "lightweight" parts have become rather popular, as opposed to "conventional" parts, traditionally constituted by a heavy mass layer on top of a soft decoupler. While "conventional" parts are based on pure insulation, "lightweight" parts propose some kind of compromise between absorption and insulation. This makes their design difficult: designing a "lightweight" part means adjusting in the proper way the balance between the absorption and the insulation provided by the part itself and the search for an optimal balance has to take into account relevant vehicle-dependent boundary conditions. Typically, in the design of a lightweight dash insulator a key role is played by the presence of the instrumentation panel and by the importance of the pass-throughs. This article describes a procedure that can help the NVH engineer in the above-mentioned task.