Numerical and experimental-aided framework based on TPA for acoustic contributions of individual transfer paths on a vehicle door in the slamming event

Abstract

The luxury sound quality of a vehicle door in the slamming event will increase consumers’ willingness to purchase the vehicle, thus its detailed investigation is a crucial consequence for the advancement of the automobile industry. This paper proposes a numerical and experimental approach on a transfer path analysis (TPA) to determine the sound quality for the individual transfer paths of the vehicle door in the slamming event. In our previous investigations, the transient impact loads of the vehicle door in the slamming event had been determined based upon lab experiment and bench test. These transient impact loads will be selected as input values for a numerical and experimental approach on the TPA. The noise transfer functions (NTFs) from the discretized path points to the driver’s ear are obtained by a numerical simulation technique. The sound pressure value at the driver’s ear is calculated and synthesized from the above transient impact loads and the NTFs and is verified by the sound pressure acquisition experiment. Then sound quality with objective evaluation is quantitively investigated utilizing five characteristic criterions: main impact time, low frequency duration, A-weighted sound pressure level, loudness, sharpness. Simultaneously, the subject evaluation is implemented to estimate the sound quality employing the laboratory-scale jury test. The back-propagation neural network (BPNN) improved via the genetic algorithm (GA) is suggested to appraise the mathematical relationship between the subjective and objective evaluation of the sound quality for the vehicle door slamming event. Finally, the built GA-BPNN model is applied to predict the subjective evaluation for the sound quality of the TPA. The transfer paths with a large contribution to the sound quality will be deemed to be suppressed objects in the subsequent analysis. This appraisal approach can be employed as a productive evaluation tool of the vehicle door slamming event for subsequent vibration and noise optimization.