Smart City
ADDED VALUE FOR AUTOMOTIVE
The term ‘automotive’ stands for a broad and demanding market with a numerous involved participants. They all have a common focus: optimized safety and comfort of the user and the world around it. A quality car, bus, cycle or any other related device has sound well, and in a high level of comfort, there’s no room for vibrations or resonance. The continuous aim to improve sound and vibrations calls for a good understanding of the matter.
LET’S SAVE TIME
Be efficient
More than in other markets, in automotive the difference between being successful or being just too late is often time-driven. When addressing a sound-issue, the difference is made by the ability to efficiently identify the exact area of improvement.
Be effective
With obtained visual insights it becomes possible to effectively do only what’s needed. This combination of efficiency and effectivity saves valuable time and prevents waste of resources, energy and materials.
Be clear
For an engineer it is also time-saving to explain a complex topic. Guided by live-stream, images and graphs, the sound-issue becomes visible to all stakeholders, independent of their acoustic experience.
CUSTOMER STORIES
CADDY DIESEL
Volkswagen
Using our Sorama technology made it easy to make a sound image of our own Volkswagen Caddy diesel engine. Among other effects, low-frequency engine noise at high spatial resolution and noise leakage through door seals, can be found.
The movie below shows a selection of these results.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES
TU/e Eindhoven Technical University
Electric vehicles take advantage of the fact that the electric engine is silent. However, due to this silence, other -previously unheard- noise sources become more dominant.
From the Sorama sound imaging pictures two components become apparent: the electrical LED-lighting-driver (left) and the water pump (right).
Consequently, a near field analysis which zooms in on these two components has provided specific recommendations for design-improvement.
FIRETRUCK
Mercedes-Benz
For firemen, the truck is their workspace and the atmosphere should be user-friendly. We analyzed the emitted sound from a fire truck during high pressure pump use.
By use of a line array of measurements we imaged the complete truck. The visualization reveals two major noise sources: the gearbox PTO and the high pressure pump.
None of the components can be left out, but their contribution can be influenced. We advised to decouple several panels and screened the pump and PTO modules for root-cause contributors.
Our recommendations have lead to significant improvement in the type and pressure of the sound as now emitted by the firetruck.
GEARBOX
DTI
Together with DTI, we analyzed an unfamiliar noise in a newly developed gearbox. The spectral analysis in combination with the sound imaging results indicated that the noise was caused by the tooth passing frequency under load. The interesting fact here is that from the frequency and harmonic-interpretation, the team could pinpoint the exact gear.
In a redesign process the noise-issue was successfully tackled by a minor modification in the specific gear.
Compared to conventional methods, this approach saved DTI 80% of lead-time whilst the effective performance increase was 15% higher than average.