This paper presents a rigid walled car cabin model to predict the acoustic effects of vehicle interior trim materials. The car cavity is made of a rigid walled enclosure system with one flexible wall on the front firewall position, where the interior trim materials are applied to the inner surface of the front firewall to modify the coupling between the flexible wall and the cabin air cavity. The car cabin is acoustically excited by using a single point source positioned at one corner of the inner air cavity to imitate the airborne noise. The propagated noise is measured by using pressure microphones at different locations inside the car cabin: one near the driver's ear position and another one near the passenger's ear position. An acoustic FE (Finite Element) model is also developed to investigate and predict the effects of interior trim materials on the car cabin noise level. Finally, the simulation results are compared with the experimentally acquired acoustic effects of the interior trim materials. The predicted acoustic response results show that the simulation agrees well with the experiment data, both with and without the interior trim materials. The noise propagating inside the car cabin is reduced by a similar ratio in both the experimental method and in the numerical analysis. The selected interior trim materials are starting to absorb noise at frequencies above 500 Hz, but they do not reduce the low-frequency noise effectively.
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