Abstract
Transfer Path Analysis (TPA) is a useful tool for the reduction of automotive noise and vibration. TPA offers the information about the contribution of the transfer paths and analysts would take effective measures with this information. However it could not seem easy to apply to the automotive body structure itself. One of the reasons is complexity of the vibration transmission in the body structure that is assembled by many members and that should be analyzed by manifold vibration transfer paths. This means there are a lot of transmitted forces an transfer functions defined in the assembled structure. This paper presents two proposals in TPA using finite element model: 1) technique in contribution analysis to the structure with manifold and continuous transfer paths, 2) visualization technique of the influence degree for the reduction of the response of the structure. In the contribution analysis, the transmitted force at every node is accurately calculated with the proposed element force calculation, and the element plays a part of a transfer path. The influence degree is newly defined by the result of the contribution analysis and assists analysts to obtain measures more efficiently. These two techniques let the analysts easy to understand the vibration transfer characteristics by the visualization. The application to an automotive body structure validates the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed approach.
