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Competitive pressures, globalization of markets, and integration of new materials and technologies into heavy vehicle suspension systems have increased demand for durability validation of new designs. Traditional Proving Ground and on-road testing for suspension development have the limitations of extremely long test times, poor repeatability and the corresponding difficultly in getting good engineering level data on failures. This test approach requires a complete vehicle driven continuously over severe Proving Ground events for extended periods. Such tests are not only time consuming but also costly in terms of equipment, maintenance, personnel, and fuel. Ideally multiple samples must be tested to accumulate equivalent millions of kilometers of operation in highly damaging environments.

The role of NVH testing has evolved from a firefighting role and a period of exploration to a well defined standard test role in the product development and validation process. Integral to this process is robust engineering, which drives the need to execute many tests quickly, efficiently and accurately. This allows the NVH specialist to concentrate on interpretation of results and spend less time on the acquisition of data. As the volume of data grows, this creates the opportunity to data mine an NVH database to compare results from large sample sizes and focus on product variation. Today's NVH laboratory is accountable for producing high quality, consistent, timely, and cost effective test reports. The basic core of the test has to be easy to set up and execute for a novice, yet still allow for exploratory tests by specialists as necessary. The NVH laboratory is now subject to the same budgetary pressures and quality audits as other testing operations.

Hyundai Motor Company has combined physical and virtual testing tools to validate a full vehicle virtual prototype. Today a large number of physical tests are still required because the cycle of “design-build-test-change” relies on complex models of components and systems that typically are not easily validated. In order to shorten the development cycles, engineers perform multi-body simulations to dynamically excite components and systems and thereby estimate their durability under dynamic loads. The approach described herein demonstrates the feasibility of correlating the output from the corresponding physical and virtual prototype. Both synthetic and road load events are employed to excite physical and virtual vehicles, reveal difference in response, and ultimately improve the predictive capability of the model.

The objective of this work was to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of road simulation testing with an emphasis on obtaining more information from the laboratory test system. Attaining the objective was evaluated by the criteria: 1) was vehicle damage detected before a major failure, 2) were changes in test conditions that would result in over- or under-testing detected, 3) were vehicle and test system components that require maintenance detected and 4) did the changes detected provide a better understanding of the test specimen and analytical predictions. The tools used for this process were not integrated. An integrated set of tools would be required to make this a general-purpose technique