Evaluation method for the development of passenger cabin shell-structure body components with regard to acoustically efficient lightweight design

Acoustic comfort is an important factor for the customer's impression of the car quality. Since lightweight design can increase efficiency and driving dynamics, it plays a key role in the development of sporty-emotional cars. For shell-structure body components, lightweight design is in contradiction to interior acoustics. This conflict confronts engineers with challenges at an early stage of development, especially for new vehicle types. The main challenges result from missing information about geometry and material prop-erties of the components, an insufficient maturity level of CAD data, the development process and the high expenditure for numerical simulations. This contribution presents an approach for a method to support the early stage of the de-velopment process regarding best-suited solutions for the trade-off between lightweight design and acoustics. It focuses on the evaluation of measures on component level. The approach is applied on a trunk floor in a battery electric vehicle and the results are compared to the pre-dictions of the approach. This approach has the potential to evaluate the interaction between lightweight design and acoustics more cost-effectively, faster and earlier in the vehicle develop-ment process. As a result, additional acoustic packages can be reduced in the late development stage.