Developing beam-forming devices to detect squeak and rattle sources by using FPGA

摘要

Industry's high interest on squeak and rattle leads the development of a beam-forming device. Detecting squeak and rattle (SR) noise has been one of the best applications of the beam-forming devices. Localizing the SR noise sources is the most important step of the whole SR noise reduction efforts. In addition, the SR noise mainly consists of high frequency components and the beam-forming has better performance in high frequency range. Successful beam-forming devices for SR noises need to have fast data processing ability in order to detect transient behavior of the SR noise. The paper introduces how digital technologies are used to develop high speed beam-forming device. Since beam-forming process mainly consists of basic mathematical operation, such as addition, delay and multiplication, the process can be implemented in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Chip. Because the FPGA has real-time MHz fixed loop rate, the processing loop rate is not the problem anymore. In this paper, two types of beam-forming devices developed by using FPGA are introduced. Application examples show the performance of the devices.