Metamodels Resulting from Two Different Geometry Morphing Approaches Are Suitable to Direct the Modification of Structure-Born Noise Transfer in the Digital Design Phase

Abstract

Noise vibration and harshness (NVH) development often takes place in the later development phases. Shifting the optimization to the early digital development phase enables more parameters to participate in the optimization and leads to a more holistic development process. Digital NVH development often modifies system and component frequency response functions (FRFs) using finite element (FE) simulation. Currently, the often manual process of creating new FE models for modified designs makes a systematic evaluation of many designs difficult and time-consuming. In this paper, we take on these difficulties and use both a Direct Morphing approach and a Box Morphing approach to automatically adopt the first existing FE models to modified designs. We use the generated simulation results to fit metamodels describing the correlation between geometrical parameters and characteristic FRF values. These metamodels provide an easy and fast to use tool for designers to consider NVH demands. In a simulation example, we demonstrate the capabilities by modifying the kinematic hard points of a vehicle suspension and using them to modify the noise transfer sensitivity. We show that the metamodels can lead the digital design process to intuitively and specifically reduce characteristic component FRF values by changing the location of the component hard points.