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The performance of structure-borne road NVH can be cascaded down to three major systems: 1) vehicle body structure, 2) chassis/suspension, 3) tire/wheel. The forces at the body attachment points are controlled by the isolation efficiency of the chassis/suspension system and the excitation at the spindle/knuckle due to the tire/road interaction. The chassis force transmissibility is a metric to quantify the isolation efficiency. This paper presents a new experimental methodology to estimate the chassis force transmissibility from a fully assembled vehicle. For the calculation of the transmissibility, the spindle force/moment estimation and the conventional Noise Path Analysis (NPA) methodologies are utilized. A merit of the methodology provides not only spindle force to body force transmissibility but also spindle moment to body force transmissibility. Hence it enables us to understand the effectiveness of the spindle moments on the body forces.

Transient road disturbances excite complex vehicle responses involving the interaction of suspension/chassis, powertrain, and body systems. Typical ones are due to the interactions between tires and road expansion joints, railway crossings and other road discontinuities. Such transient disturbances are generally perceived as “impact harshness” due to the harshness perception as sensed by drivers through both sound and vibration. This paper presents a study of quantifying the effects of sound, steering wheel and seat/floorpan vibrations on the overall perception of the “impact harshness” during impact transient events. The Vehicle Vibration Simulator (VVS) of the Ford Research Laboratory was used to conduct this study. The results of the study show that sound and vibration have approximately equal impact on the overall perception of impact harshness. There is no evidence of interaction between sound and vibration.

Tire cavity noise refers to the excitation of the acoustic mode of a tire cavity. The noise exhibits itself as sharp resonance-like peaks with frequencies typically in the range of 190-250Hz. For a rolling tire, the tire contact with the road moves relative to the tire. Furthermore, the load on the tire breaks the circular symmetry of the tire. Consequently, the peak frequency of the cavity noise shows dependence on the tire load and the vehicle speed. There are no models that simultaneously take these two factors into consideration. In this paper, we propose an analytical model and present experimental verifications of predictions on the noise peak frequency and its dependence on the tire load and vehicle speed. A wireless experimental measurement system is also presented which enables the measurement of tire cavity frequency for both non-rolling and rolling conditions.