A Combined Computational-Experimental Approach for Modelling of Coupled Vibro-Acoustic Problems 2013-01-1997

Over the past 30 years, the computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools have been applied extensively in the automotive industry. In order to accelerate time-to-market while coping with legal limits that have become increasingly restrictive over the last decades, CAE has become an indispensable tool covering all major fields in a modern automotive product design process.

However, when tackling complex real-life engineering problems, the computational models might become rather involved and thus less efficient. Therefore, the overall trend in the automotive industry is currently heading towards combined approaches, which allow the best of the both worlds, namely the experimental measurement and numerical simulation, to be merged into one integrated scheme.

In this paper, the so-called patch transfer function (PTF) approach is adopted to solve coupled vibro-acoustic problems. In the PTF scheme, the interfaces between fluid and structure are discretised in terms of patches. This allows the different sub-systems to be characterised in a separate way by their respective surface impedance matrix. The strong mutual interaction between the structure and fluid can be accounted for using an impedance matrix coupling procedure. The novelty of the approach proposed consists in the fact that the interface impedance matrix can be determined in both experimental or computation fashion, paving the way to hybrid prediction schemes, which combine numerical models with experimentally characterised sub-systems.