Noise Control, Sound, and the Vehicle Design Process

摘要

For many products, noise and sound are viewed as necessary evils that need to be dealt with in order to bring the product successfully to market. They are generally not product "exciters" although some vehicle manufacturers do tune and advertise specific sounds to enhance the perception of their products. In this paper, influencing the design process for the "evils", such as wind noise and road noise, are considered in more detail. There are three ingredients to successfully dealing with the evils in the design process. The first of these is knowing how excesses in noise effects the end customer in a tangible manner and how that effects customer satisfaction and ultimately sells. The second is having and delivering the knowledge of what is required of the design to achieve a satisfactory or even better level of noise performance. The third ingredient is having the commitment of the designers to incorporate the knowledge into their part, subsystem or system. In this paper, the elements of each of these ingredients are discussed in some detail and the attributes of a successful design process are enumerated.