During the last years, promising research results have been obtained on the level of smart materials and active control concepts and the use in practical applications is prototyped. In order to bring these research results to the level of industrial use, the related design processes have to become part of the complete product creation process. This requires that the product functional performance simulation models, which are the cornerstone of today’s design process, must be capable of supporting the specific aspects related to advanced materials, active systems, actuators, sensors and control and integrate these into system level virtual prototype models.
To make the next step, from Acoustic Design to Sound Quality Design, not only the general response characteristics, but also the actual temporal and spectral signal structures from the controlled sound need to be optimized to meet the Sound Quality targets. To realize this, several approaches can be followed, based on a frequency domain sound synthesis concept extending the classical Virtual Car Sound approach, as well as on time domain synthesis concept, combining time domain simulation capabilities with sound generation and perception. The research is executed in the context of the EC projects InMAR and Smart Structures.
