MSC Software Corporation

Having a pleasant driving experience is a key determinant when purchasing or driving a vehicle. For companies buying trucks and for truck drivers, it is also a matter of health and productivity. Most drivers spend more than 8 hours a day in the truck cabin. High noise levels or unpleasant sounds in a working environment are known to cause excessive fatigue and health problems. It is therefore crucial for truck manufacturers to carefully design their new products and shape the cabin noise to go beyond the requirements of their customers, and propose the most enjoyable driving experience possible.

With a wide range of premium trucks, Scania, one of the world’s leading truck manufacturers naturally aims at designing trucks with outstanding comfort and performance. Scania’s Complete Vehicle Acoustic Department is focused on getting their vehicles up to speed with today’s drivers’ expectations by addressing the level and quality of cabin noise in their vehicles. The development for more optimized cabins is supported by extensive testing and the introduction of new methods based on vibro-acoustic simulations. For this endeavor, Scania’s development team chose to use Actran, a product of FFT, an MSC Software Company, to improve their designs and shorten their design cycles.

Scania aims to increasingly utilize Actran’s simulations results to compare different designs and define the design directions early in the product development cycle, without the need for physical testing. To support this decision-making process, a listening studio was built at Scania. The studio is similar to that of a professional mixing studio. It encompasses a 7.1 surround system for sound and is designed to produce exactly the same listening experience for anyone who is seated in the center of the room. During subjective evaluation sessions, Per-Olof conveys to his fellow colleagues his findings based on his simulations. He combines test and simulation data to replicate the environment of driving an actual truck. This process helps managers to make important decisions, which will affect the design of the cabin. “It is a very different response from management when you can play a sound and they can have this subjective experience,” Per-Olof said. “It’s not really possible to understand from a graph what you will hear in the truck,” he explained.

With the use of Actran in this new simulation process and the subjective evaluations allowed by the listening studio, Scania now has all the tools needed to improve its customer driving experience even further, while having a more efficient design process.

Enhancing the design of the truck to prevent the negative effects of Cabin Noise