Investigation on Road Noise Transmission through Steering System

Sammanfattning: An investigation on noise transmission through the steering gear system is focused on the area of vehicle NVH (Noise Vibration and Harshness). From previous investigations it is well known that noise transmission through the steering system sometimes has a significant influence referring to tire road noise. In these cases, the interface force between steering gear and vehicle subframe is usually of interest during early stages of vehicle development. The target of the current work is to validate an approach based on a method, commonly known as the “Blocked force method” for noise and vibration testing, and check if it is possible to estimate the interface forces based on this method. This method became popular for mechanical testing in the middle 1900s [1] [2] [3], because of its easy applicability. The basic idea is to fix the component on a rigid plate and measure the interface force at the coupling points with force transducers inserted in between. It has a considerable potential in practical use, because if the blocked force could provide a good estimation for the interface force in noise transmission, it enables an efficient measurement of critical NVH behaviors without having to resort to the complete vehicle.However intuitively, the blocked force data could not be used directly. As a result, a coupled system equation is used for the coupling of the steering gear and the car body. Both the inertance of car body and steering system are taken into account, and thus introduces a compensation for the difference between vehicle and test bench. The method is validated against the transfer function measured on the full vehicle as the reference and compare this with the result calculated with the measured “Blocked force” data. Siemens Test.Lab is used for data acquisition and first data processing. Matlab is used for data post processing. Matrix symmetrization and singular value truncation is used to deal with the ill-conditioned data of steering gear inertance. A hybrid model with Finite Element data is proposed. Two test conditions are investigated: one set is with rigid coupling and the other is decoupled with rubber.