Assessment of vibro-acoustic sound emissions based on structural dynamics

Acoustic emission plays a significant role in product design regarding usability and customer comfort. Consequently, prediction of the emitted sound, e.g., radiated sound power, is desired as early as possible in the development cycle. In industry, performing extensive acoustic testing is often not feasible due to the lack of an anechoic room of appropriate dimensions, or time limitations. On the other hand, structural dynamics data is often available from a simulation model of the mechanical structure, or can be more easily obtained through experiments using accelerometers or laser vibrometry due to the relaxed constraints on the measurement environment compared to acoustic measurements.
Therefore, this contribution presents an approach to utilize available surface velocity data to give accurate predictions of the acoustic emissions over a wide frequency range. The method relies on mapping source data to a surface discretization of the device and subsequent simulation of the free-field Helmholtz problem using the open-source boundary element framework NiHu. The approach is applied to multiple problems, including a previously established aeroacoustic benchmark problem, to show its capabilities and limitations.