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Few months ago I came across this very entertaining Electric Vehicle commercial from Volkswagen Canada:
While I can appreciate Volkswagen for their creative approach to marketing, it made me realize that even though the commercial comes with a small-print warning:
Screenshot from the Volkswagen Canada YouTube commercial of the new VW e-Golf
It does fit into a certain trend of building the expectation that hybrid and electric vehicles are not only completely silent, but also pose no serious challange to NVH engineers. Working in the automotive industry, we know that this is certainly not the case. Lack of the combustion engine might have caused these cars to be in general more quiet, but at the same time it became critical to lower the noise created by all the other components, which in the past used to be conviniently masked.
With that in mind, the content of 2019.1 release has been carefully planned to make sure that Simcenter Testlab can support NVH and sound quality engineers (not only those working on EVs) even better, making them more productive and delivering more insight into the test results. Here are (in my personal, slightly biased opinion) 5 most important extensions to Testlab for sound quality:
- Importing and synchronizing externally measured video files
Documenting your measurement with a GoPro camera recording can help in troubleshooting transient sound quality issues. You can now import and synchronize any externally measured MP4 video (from USB cameras, smartphones, tablets, etc.) .
In this example the electric vehicle under test has an option to enable the ECO mode. While in ECO mode, the vehicle uses regenerative braking. This causes a very tonal and unpleasant order 10.25 to become audible. We are using sound quality metrics to confirm that this order is the most prominent tonal component in the measured signal. The results shown a very strong correlation between the:e
- enabled ECO mode (GoPro video)
- tonal 10.25th order (Prominence Ratio map)
- noise localization shifting to the Gearbox (Simcenter Sound Camera video)
You can especially hear and see it when at a certain moment the operator just turns the ECO mode off and on a few times in a row.
Simcenter Scope 2019.1 supports measuring video with either the front or read camera of the tablet together with your SCADAS XS measurement
- Interactive audio filter sets
We have further enhanced the visualization of the filter cut-off frequencies during audio replay. It is now also possible to save and load complete sets of filters, also in real time.
Interactively degine cut-off frequencies of the audio replay filters
- Fully calibrated and equalized audio replay
Audio replay in Simcenter Testlab Neo makes it very easy to not only calibrate your replay chain, but also to re-apply the head&torso correction on binaural measurements that have been equalized for analysis. Additionally, you can now remove the effect of headphones used during replay.
Equalized and calibrated high-quality audio replay at your fingertips
Replaying using HEAD’s acoustic playback systems? No worries; we’ve got you covered!
- More psychoacoustic metrics and off-zero order filtering
Sound Quality Analysis library has been expanded with more sound quality metrics: Fluctuation Strength and Tone-to-noise Ratio. Additionally, you can now calculate order sections on sound quality maps. Want more insight? Filter our off-zero orders and compare the results using the automatic preview and pivot view functionality.
Easily filter out off-zero orders
- Subjective evaluate and rank sounds with Scheffé’s Method
Are you looking for an easy to conduct jury test, that will give you the same insight as category judgement or paired comparison? Simcenter Testlab Jury Testing has been extended with the Scheffé’s method of paired comparison.
Scheffe’s Method for paired comparison makes it more easy for jurors to rate sound features
- ..and many more!
Get your Simcenter Testlab 2019.1 upgrade today and let us know what you think!