NVH Vehicle Simulator

MIRA's noise vibration and harshness (NVH) department has always been leading the way in solving our customers problems. The latest innovation is MIRA’s NVH vehicle noise simulator which allows you to drive a virtual vehicle in a realistic environment.

With the NVH simulator, the interior noise of the vehicle will be accurately reproduced for any combination of road speed, engine speed, throttle opening and selected gear. This allows engineers to do the following in a controlled environment:

• Compare multiple vehicles back to back in real time on the same roads for benchmarking and target-setting
• Compare the noise characteristics of a vehicle at various stages during its NVH development, using a reference that can be a prototype vehicle that doesn’t exist anymore.
• Carry out jury evaluations of the noise characteristics with expert or non-expert assessors. All assessors can drive vehicles on the same roads and in the same conditions, eliminating any bias or test condition variability.

The vehicle noise can be split into its contributory components to varying degrees of complexity: from a simple powertrain/road and wind noise split, right down to a complete breakdown by every noise generating source. This allows:

• Individual noise transmission path contributions to be assessed whilst driving the virtual vehicle

  

• Causes of specific sound quality issues to be identified
• Individual contributions to be filtered and assessed in order to derive how much improvement is required to achieve a target sound
• Source levels to be modified to achieve a specific ‘brand sound’

Screen view - CAE predictions to be combined with real vehicle data and driven in a virtual vehicle, eg alternative silencer designs, powertrains, tyres, etc.

At each stage of development, the complete virtual vehicle can be driven and re-assessed against competitors to monitor progress and to ensure that no additional NVH issues have been inadvertently introduced.