Design for NVH: A roadmap for robust NVH design and development

Noise Vibration and Harshness (NVH) issues are proven to be main driver for customer dissatisfaction in recent years. The challenge facing engineers lies in the fact that NVH issues are not typically caused by hard failures, and so predicting an NVH failure and designing for it can be a cumbersome task.; Current activities at the automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) deal with NVH issues as part of a tuning process staged late in the product development of the vehicle. Current processes are disorganized and not cost effective.; In this work we propose a new comprehensive design and development process that accounts for noise and vibration issues in the early design stages. While the new proposed methodology is one of the contributions of this work, the main contributions are in three areas that see little or no attention in current vehicle development practices; NVH model analysis, NVH design optimization, and design for good NVH performance at high mileage.; In the model analysis stage; we reviewed the various tools used for analyzing NVH phenomena. We proposed using different tools for different issues. Since model complexity is the main hurdle in NVH model analysis, we proposed various techniques for model simplification.; Our next contribution is in the area of design optimization; we offered a fresh look revealing new advances in robust design and design evaluation techniques. We showed how these new techniques can be applied to NVH.; And lastly we shed a light on design for NVH at high mileage. Current NVH practices design for a good NVH performance at zero miles. In this work we reviewed aging effects on NVH, and proposed a thorough design and analysis methodology to successfully maintain good performance at high mileage.