Prediction of Fluid-borne Noise Transmission Using AcuSolve and OptiStruct

In this work, Altair Engineering's vibroacoustic modeling approach is used to simulate the acoustic signature of a simplified automobile in a wind tunnel. The modeling approach relies on a two step procedure involving simulation and extraction of acoustic sources using a high fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation followed by propagation of the acoustic energy within the structure and passenger compartment using a structural dynamics solver. The tools necessary to complete this process are contained within Altair's HyperWorks CAE software suite. The CFD simulations are performed using AcuSolve and the structural simulations are performed using OptiStruct. This vibroacoustics simulation methodology relies on calculation of the acoustic sources from the flow solution computed by AcuSolve. The sources are based on Lighthill's analogy and are sampled directly on the acoustic mesh. Once the acoustic sources have been computed, they are transformed into the frequency domain using a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) with advanced sampling and are subsequently used in the structural acoustics model. Although this approach does require the CFD solver to have knowledge of the acoustic simulation domain a priori, it avoids modeling errors introduced by evaluation of the acoustic source terms using dissimilar meshes and numerical methods. The aforementioned modeling approach is demonstrated on the Hyundai Simplified Model (HSM) geometry in this work. This geometry contains flow features that are representative of the dominant noise sources in a typical automobile design; namely vortex shedding from the passenger compartment A-pillar and bluff body shedding from the side view mirrors. The geometry also contains a thick poroelastic material on the interior that acts to reduce the acoustic noise. This material is modeled using a Biot material formulation during the structural acoustic simulation. Successful prediction of the acoustic noise within the HSM geometry serves to validate the vibroacoustic modeling approach for automotive applications.