Utilizing A Hybrid Engineering Approach for NVH Drive Evaluations in Virtual Prototypes

As pressures mount to remove physical prototyping from the vehicle development process, there is a growing need for subjective evaluations of virtual prototypes. Virtually assessing NVH vehicle targets and using driving simulators to make those early critical design decisions is becoming a larger part of the NVH engineering process. Today this is only possible if you put a driving simulator at the center of your development process. Being able to drive and evaluate both test and simulation results simultaneously in a simulator allows engineering teams to leverage a hybrid engineering approach. By starting with measured on-road data from a physical vehicle, engineers can build virtual prototypes. By using this hybrid engineering process to incorporate CAE and test data together an engineer can create a virtual vehicle model with the desired NVH characteristics as a physical vehicle. While collecting test data can typically be a limiting factor without a prototype vehicle, the hybrid engineering approach allows for flexibility while gaining context from expanding the frequency range of evaluation using CAE and surrogate test data sets. This paper will share a generic example of how using the NVH Simulator allows for a vehicle subsystem to be substituted into a different vehicle virtually and make it possible to drive and assess subjectively NVH targets and performance at an early stage.