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Typical approaches to regulating sound performance of vehicles and products rely upon A-weighted sound pressure level or sound power level. It is well known that these parameters do not provide a complete picture of the customer’s perception of the product and may mislead engineering efforts for product improvement. A leading manufacturer of agricultural equipment set out to implement a process to include sound quality targets in its product engineering cycle. First, meaningful vehicle level targets were set for a tractor by conducting extensive jury evaluation testing and by using objective metrics that represent the customer’s subjective preference for sound. Sensitivity studies (“what-if” games) were then conducted, using the predicted sound quality (SQ) index as validation metric, to define the impact on the SQ performance of different noise components (frequency ranges, tones, transients).

With the current focus of the automotive industry on improving fuel consumption, it is becoming increasingly more common to adapt current/existing vehicle platforms for integration with electric powertrains. This integration can have an impact on many areas of the vehicle development process, including noise and vibration performance. Alongside the understood benefits to fuel economy, electric powertrains can present many unique noise and vibration related development challenges which require specific attention, particularly for cases in which a conventional gasoline engine vehicle platform is used as a surrogate for the electric powertrain. In this paper, several of the potential noise and vibration development activities will be highlighted, including discussions on powertrain vibration, accessory noise and vibration, and acoustic package material development to deliver a refined noise and vibration experience to the customer.

In the current changing noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) landscape, there is an increased amount of collaboration between NVH engineers and other attribute engineering groups to solve complex issues. One of these complex issues is ride comfort. An increasing amount of ride comfort development is happening between NVH and ride and handling (R&H) engineers. To apply a NVH process to a R&H phenomenon, it is important to ensure that both the transducer selection as well as analysis method will be applicable over the frequency range of interest. Specifically for ride comfort development, the validation of the use of strain gauges and accelerometers along with source path contribution analysis, or transfer path analysis, is key to bridging the gap between NVH and R&H.