Damping Loss Factor Estimation for Test-Based Vehicle SEA Modeling

In the test-based SEA models, the major parameters are measured or estimated from measured quantities. One of the parameters is Damping Loss Factor (DLF) of the air (passenger) cavity of a vehicle. In the SEA model, the air cavity is divided into several sub-cavities. The required DLF for each sub-cavity can be calculated from the reverberation time (T60) measured in that sub-cavity in the vehicle. However, if nothing is done to separate one sub-cavity from other sub-cavities in the T60 measurement in the vehicle, the measured T60 for that sub-cavity is the T60 of the whole air cavity. When the resulted DLF is used in SEA model of that sub-cavity, it is the DLF of the whole air cavity that is used for a sub-cavity, which will result in an over/under-damped. Thus, the prediction from such a SEA model will have bias error especially in the higher frequency range. This has been seen in the results of a vehicle SEA model. In this paper, a method is proposed to estimate the DLF of each sub-cavity based on the T60 of the whole air cavity. When these estimated DLF’s are used in the SEA model for each sub-cavity, the correlation in SEA model was improved by 2.5∼3 dB above 1kHz.