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During the vehicle development process in the premium and luxury automotive segments an important task is the refinement of noise, vibration and harshness. Along with other attributes such as styling, drivability and vehicle dynamics it strongly influences the overall perception of the vehicle. At the same time the automotive manufacturers need to release more products faster to the market using shorter vehicle development time with reduced cost. Altogether this has increased the use of virtual models and decreased the number of test vehicles in the programs. When assembling vehicles in production there will be a natural variation, which will result in a spread in the attribute performances. When shifting towards virtual models and reduced numbers of physical test vehicles there is a higher risk that the variations in production will be neglected, leading to more customer complaints.

In the automotive industry, there is an increasing need for gaining efficiency and confidence in the prediction capability for various attributes. Often, one component or sub-system is used in a number of car models of one vehicle platform. Many of these components are potential sources of noise, vibration and squeak and rattle. In order to provide an early prognosis, vibro-acoustic source characterization in combination with the source-to-response transfer behavior are required. This paper describes the process of predicting the vibrational behavior due to a woofer, which could induce squeak and rattle, on a door panel. Blocked forces, determined indirectly in-situ by frequency response functions and operational accelerations, were used for quantifying the source activity. Those forces were in a second step loaded on to a finite element model in order to predict the response when the speaker was mounted to another position in an upcoming car model.