Application and optimization of damping pad to a body-in-white of a vehicle for improved road noise, vibration and harshness performance

Abstract

Road noise is expected to become even more important in the vehicleproduct development cycle due to electrification and challenginglightweight/emission targets. In this study, a topology optimizationalgorithm is applied to determine the damping pad layout on the roof andfloor panels of a Body-in-White (BIW), being the dominant contributors onroad noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) performance of an automotive.Optimization algorithm yields the prescribed % of the surface area of thesepanels where the damping pad should be distributed set by the automotiveOriginal Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). The objective function is theminimization of the overall acceleration of these panels for the frequenciesup to 200 Hz, while the weight of the BIW is considered as the optimizationconstraint. The results of the optimization are compared with the road NVHperformance of panels with full damping and no damping. The optimizationresults indicate that by using 25% of the damping pad on the roof and floorpanels improve the vibration performance especially in the frequency rangeof 80 Hz to 150 Hz significantly compared to bare BIW panels. Besides,the performance of the 25% damping is almost same as the application offull damping pad for frequencies between 90 Hz to 110 Hz. The resultsshow that the methodology is able to address the trade-offs between roadNVH and weight targets effectively.