Accuracy verification of GT-Power model and reduction of computational time

Abstract: The noise produced by any new vehicles is tightly regulated by the European Union which have developed a standardised method for measuring the emitted noise of new vehicles. The method involves a vehicle driving past carefully positioned microphones at a specific range of engine speeds. Doing actual tests is time consuming and cost inefficient, thus, it would be beneficial to minimise the number of tests performed during development. There are multiple different noise sources contributing to the total noise levels emitted by a truck such as, aerodynamic noise, road noise, exhaust noise etc. In this project solely the exhaust noise will be investigated. There are existing models that can simulate the exhaust noise by using the source characteristics of the engine. The accuracy of the models that can calculate the source data is uncertain and they are often computationally heavy. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to verify the accuracy of the source acoustics of the engine for one such model and try to minimise the calculation times. To verify the accuracy of existing models a test is constructed that will be performed both by measurements and simulations in GT-Power. The aim is to use both methods to predict the source pressure and impedance, then compare the results and analyse any similarities. The test setup works as the guide for how to design the simulation model. This is mainly due to the difficulty to procure the necessary equipment needed to perform the test. Thus, the simulation models had to be adapted to match the layout of the test to the extent it is possible. The data obtained through testing needs to be post processed by performing an averaging to reduce the noise and use the two microphone method to calculate the source pressure. The data from simulation is also processed through a Multi-Load method to estimate the source pressure. The sound pressure level is then cal- culated for each method and the total SPL for each method is compared over the entire rev range. However, the resulting total SPL from each of the two approaches are different to each other. This suggests that the simulations should be used with caution when analysing acoustics. To try and reduce the computational time, one method is to reduce the size of the input data. This can be done in two different ways, either by reducing the number of engine speeds investigated or by reducing the number of frequencies analysed for each engine speed. Reducing speeds might not always be possible, thus, reducing the number of frequencies for each speed will be investigated. Analysing the pressure signal in the frequency domain show that the frequencies linked to the engine orders contain significantly larger pressures than the rest of the frequencies. Thus, solely these frequencies could be used to reduce the computational time but still give a representative result. In order to analyse the affect of removing frequencies the total acoustic energy is calculated for each engine speed and is compared with the acoustic energy of the frequencies belonging to the five first engine orders for the same speeds. These calculations of the sound energy show that the five first engine orders contain above 95% of the total sound energy for each engine speed. This suggests that it might be viable to use solely the pressure produced by the engine orders and still produce representative simulations. Thus, reduce the calculation time without affecting the results substantially.