Experimental and numerical vibro-acoustic investigation on a trimmed car door to analyze slamming event

Abstract The closing sound of a car door is objectively not related to the intrinsic quality of the vehicle but it is an important subjective parameter for vehicle evaluation. For automotive developers, it is very interesting to deepen this phenomenon and to define a methodology to understand the influence of several parameters on door-closing sound quality. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the possibility of analysing this phenomenon, called car-door slamming, using a numerical simulation approach. Simulation methods for vibro-acoustic analysis are sufficiently robust and predictive in the case of simple systems, as it emerges from a parallel investigation conducted on an elementary component like an annular disk. In simulating complex systems, as in the case of door slamming, where non-linearities may be significant, methods are not always reliable and sufficiently predictive. In the specific case, the main difficulty is to correctly identify the dynamic behaviour of a trimmed car door, which is a very complex system. The paper reports an analysis and a comparison between the experimental and simulation results of the car-door slamming phenomenon, highlighting the dependence of the quality of the numerical results on the particular simulation method adopted. The paper also reports an experimental and numerical vibro-acoustic analysis of a trimmed car door isolated from the vehicle with no constraints (free-free condition) to ascertain its dynamic behaviour in a simpler condition not coupled to the vehicle. The result shows a significant level of system complexity even in this case.