Study of Element Size and Seal Model Length on TL of the Automobile Door Sealing System

When the vehicle is driven at high speeds, usually above 80 km/h, wind noise becomes the main noise and the silts or little channels on the automobile body surface become the main path, through which exterior noise propagates into the vehicle interior compartment. So it's significant to improve the sound insulation performance of automobile door sealing system in order to reduce the vehicle interior noise and improve the interior speech intelligibility. In our research on the sound insulation of the automobile door seals, a 3D FE (Three-Dimensional Finite Element) model of the automobile door sealing system, which contains the channel between the automobile door and the vehicle body frame, can be built to simulate its nonlinear contact and compression before the hybrid FE-SEA (Finite Element - Statistic Energy Analysis) model is used to predict the sound transmission loss (TL) of the door sealing system. Based on the FE and hybrid FE-SEA methods, the effects of the element size and the length for the seal models on the sound TL of the sealing system are studied. In the study, both simple rectangular sealing strip and the real automobile door sealing system are chosen for the model element size and length study. In addition, the theoretical analysis about the effect of the simple rectangular model length on its sound TL is carried out. Finally how the seal model element size and length affect the sound TL of the automobile door sealing system is obtained.