Air vent is a complex assembly with many child parts which leads to manufacturing and assembly variations. It has been observed that in same production lot there has been considerable assembly variations leading to issues like vane free play and shut off flap free plays. Rattle noise is main attribute parameter to judge BSR quality of final product for all automotive OEM's. However, air vent is mostly supplier driven parts for which the specification for rattle noise requirements and its mapping to assembly variations is never considered during design and development phase. This paper presents the first phase to understand the sound quality parameters required to assess the rattle intensity and subjectively relate to customer verbatim. In this study, subjective evaluation of rattle intensity is compared with the psychoacoustic parameters (statistical loudness, statistical sharpness and roughness) from physical noise measurement. Quiet shaker was used to excite the air-vent using random PSD vibration of 5-100 Hz range. Fifteen air vents were selected from three different manufacturing lot to evaluate subjective and objective measurements related to air vent rattle. Results shows a good correlation for statistical loudness and roughness with subjective evaluation. This study proposes an optimized method to test air vent at component level for squeak and rattle evaluation in product validation phase.
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