Engineers designing products with acoustic noise and vibration constraints can simulate larger systems with more components in reasonable time using Actran 18. Free Field Technologies recently announced its latest release of the Actran tool family to improve noise and vibration analysis and simulation capability.
Noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) requirements drive the automotive industry, as well as others including aerospace, railway and consumer goods. Customers are demanding automobiles, trains and buses have a smoother ride, less vibration and less noise. The traditional approach of building a physical prototype and then testing, refining and retesting until design goals are achieved is time consuming, expensive and inefficient. NVH tools, like Actran 18, reduce engineering costs and time to market by enabling full simulation of a product, such as an automobile, to virtually evaluate acoustic performance and eliminate the need to build and iterate prototypes multiple times.
Actran incorporates multiple tools within an integrated tool suite to minimize the learning curve and provide a similar interface for each tool:
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(Image courtesy of Free Field Technologies.) |
Actran Acoustics Engineers can analyze interior and exterior noise propagation with the acoustics module. The module includes time and frequency domain solvers and interfaces to structural finite element analysis (FEA) and multi-body dynamics (MBD) tools to simulate acoustic radiation from vibrating structures.
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(Image courtesy of Free Field Technologies.) |
Actran Vibro-Acoustics Engineers can analyze structural dynamics and the interaction between structures and acoustic fluids with the add-on Vibro-Acoustics module. Complex sound absorbing material can be incorporated into the design and simulated. Structures are modeled in Actran or an external FEA tool and then loaded with realistic excitations ranging from simple loadings to turbulent boundary layer stochastics.
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(Image courtesy of Free Field Technologies.) |
Actran for Trimmed Body Engineers can analyze acoustic trim components on complex structures with this module. Users can accurately model noise level that passengers in a vehicle will perceive due to vibration sources such as engine and suspension mounts as well as noise sources including wind, engine and exhaust. Â
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(Image courtesy of Free Field Technologies.) |
Actran Aero-Acoustics Accurately predict noise generated by turbulent flows with this tool. It calculates equivalent noise sources and acoustic propagation based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) flow simulation results and can interface with other vendors’ tools.
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(Image courtesy of Free Field Technologies.) |
Actran SNGR This tool accelerates calculation of generated noise. Acoustic noise sources are synthesized based on the CFD analysis, which drastically reduces the computation required for a conventional full-system analysis.
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(Image courtesy of Free Field Technologies.) |
Actran TM Engineers can model sound radiated by turbo machinery with this tool. Efficient solver technologies and parallel processing techniques enable simulation of systems with large geometry sizes or high complexity. Combining this tool with the DGM tool enables analysis of engine exhaust.
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(Image courtesy of Free Field Technologies) |
Actran DGM Solve linearized time domain Euler equations using the discontinuous Galerkin method (DGM) to analyze complex flows such as temperature gradients and supersonic flows. Scalability and GPU acceleration reduce time required to complete the analysis.
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(Image courtesy of Free Field Technologies.) |
Actran VI Engineers can perform pre- and post-processing on the model with the graphical user interface (GUI). Actran VI includes meshing tools optimized to generate, modify and improve meshes for vibration and acoustic analysis. Post-processing tools include plots, maps, animations and waterfall diagrams.
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