Using rectified linear unit and swish based artificial neural networks to describe noise transfer in a full vehicle context

J Acoust Soc Am. 2021 Sep;150(3):2088. doi: 10.1121/10.0005535.

Abstract

Vehicle interior noise is a quality criterion of passenger cars. A considerable amount of resources is used to evaluate and design the acoustic environment with respect to given requirements. The customer's perception in the end-of-line vehicle is the main criterion. Therefore, full vehicle testing is a large part of today's sound comfort development. To increase efficiency, it is desirable to limit the hardware testing to a specific component. A later reassembly of the full vehicle is done virtually using transfer functions. These transfer functions of the substructures can be derived numerically or through measurements. However, full vehicle simulations are still challenging. Hence, transfer functions are typically measured but come with the burden of complex procedures. In this work, the authors propose a machine learning algorithm to reduce the effort for finding suitable transfer models in the automotive context. Artificial neural networks with rectified linear unit and swish activation functions are trained on full vehicle measurements. Multiple operation conditions are used for training. The networks compute spectral system responses and relative sensitivities for the input features. The performance is discussed with respect to the full vehicle validation data. The results indicate an effective procedure to reduce the costs of full-size vehicle measurements.