Plenary Lecture: Numerical Techniques for Acoustics and Vibrations: Virtual Tools for Real Problems
Keynote lecture
KU Leuven
Monday 1 june, 2015, 13:50 - 14:40
Auditorium 2 (592)
Abstract:
Over the last decades, customer demands regarding acoustic performance, along with the tightening of the legal regulations on noise emission levels and human exposure to noise, have made the acoustic properties of products and processes into an important criterion in many design problems. In the automotive and aerospace industry, for instance, the passengers’ acoustic comfort has become an important commercial asset. This affects the efforts in reducing the weight of cars and aircraft which can induce substantial noise and vibration levels.
There is also a growing interest in the use of acoustics in a context of condition monitoring and predictive maintenance, as (changes in) acoustic emissions may typically reveal information on the (possible gradually degrading) state of a product or process.
In order to incorporate these acoustic criteria in the design process or monitor them during the operational lifetime, there is a strong need for numerical prediction tools that provide the necessary insights in the physical phenomena which govern the acoustic behaviour of complex real-life systems.
Despite the advent of ever increasing computational resources and the tremendous R&D efforts that are being spent on numerical techniques for acoustic and vibration simulations, there are still some hurdles to take to allow for the widespread industrial use of these techniques for non-expert design and maintenance engineers. These include the need for techniques that can cover the entire audio frequency range at affordable costs and that can account for uncertainty and variability in geometrical, material and manufacturing properties. Automated techniques that allow for a proper identification of model inputs and model parameters as well an automated digital link between geometrical design models and functional performance models would make numerical tools more accessible to a non-expert engineering community.
This presentation describes several research activities, performed at the KU Leuven Noise and Vibration Research Group, to reduce or possibly remove the aforementioned hurdles.