Identification of the airborne component of tyre-induced vehicle interior noise

Abstract The dominant noise generation mechanism of a tyre below 1 kHz is the tyre wall vibration caused by collisions between the tread blocks and the road. This paper is concerned with the identification of the transmission path of this tyre noise into a vehicle. A stationary tyre is excited by an electrodynamic shaker and a description of surface velocity is obtained. A reciprocity technique is used to measure the transfer functions which describe the transmission of sound from points on a tyre wall to a point inside a vehicle. The combination of these measurements offers a means of separating airborne noise from structure-borne noise while, at the same time, providing information on the relative contribution of various regions of this vibrating tyre surface to vehicle interior noise.