Application and optimization of damping pad to a body-in-white of a vehicle for improved road noise, vibration and harshness performance

Abstract

Road noise is expected to become even more important in the vehicle product development cycle due to electrification and challenging lightweight/emission targets. In this study, a topology optimization algorithm is applied to determine the damping pad layout on the roof and floor panels of a Body-in-White (BIW), being the dominant contributors on road noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) performance of an automotive. Optimization algorithm yields the prescribed % of the surface area of these panels where the damping pad should be distributed set by the automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). The objective function is the minimization of the overall acceleration of these panels for the frequencies up to 200 Hz, while the weight of the BIW is considered as the optimization constraint. The results of the optimization are compared with the road NVH performance of panels with full damping and no damping. The optimization results indicate that by using 25% of the damping pad on the roof and floor panels improve the vibration performance especially in the frequency range of 80 Hz to 150 Hz significantly compared to bare BIW panels. Besides, the performance of the 25% damping is almost same as the application of full damping pad for frequencies between 90 Hz to 110 Hz. The results show that the methodology is able to address the trade-offs between road NVH and weight targets effectively.