Acoustic Modeling and Radiated Noise Prediction for Plastic Air-Intake Manifolds 2003-01-1448

Reliable prediction of the radiated noise due to the air pressure pulsation inside air-intake manifolds (AIM) is of significant interest in the automotive industry. A practical methodology to model plastic AIMs and a prediction process to compute the radiated noise are presented in this paper. The measured pressure at the engine inlet valve of an AIM is applied as excitation on an acoustic boundary element model of the AIM in order to perform a frequency response analysis. The measured air pressure pulsation is obtained in the crank-angle domain. This pressure is read into MATLAB and transformed into the frequency domain using the fast Fourier transform. The normal modes of the structure are computed in ABAQUS and a coupled analysis in SYSNOISE is launched to couple the boundary element model and the finite element model of the structure. The computed surface vibration constitutes the excitation for an acoustic uncoupled boundary element analysis. The numerical results of the radiated noise from the manifold are obtained from this uncoupled analysis. A special technique is used to prevent the radiated noise from being contaminated by the inlet noise.