Major grant will fund vital acoustics research

The University of Salford will lead a major research effort looking at new ways of testing products that produce high frequency sound and vibrations. Such products are becoming increasingly important and more common due to electrification and efforts to reach Net Zero.

Cars, trains, satellites, boats, airplanes, and buildings are complex structures where vibration has to be accurately simulated during design. If excessive noise is created by the vibration, then this can affect health and well-being, result in products failing to meet regulations, as well as reducing sales and customer satisfaction.

Currently there is no way to test these products in a reliable way. Working with the University of Nottingham, and with funding from the EPSRC, the £1m, three-year project will develop novel approaches and new techniques using the unique facilities at Salford’s acoustic laboratories.

News of the grant comes just days after planning permission was granted for a brand-new state of the art acoustics building to be created by the University of Salford in the Salford Crescent Innovation Zone.

Industrial giants such as Jaguar Land Rover, BAE Systems, Siemens and Airbus are all supporting the research.

Joshua Meggitt, will lead the work at the University of Salford. He said: “Electric vehicles are known to produce high frequency noise of a type not generally audible in their combustion driven counterparts.  This raises a new acoustics problem which we have not had to deal with before, and at the current state-of-the-art we simply don’t have the tools for the job. It’s a neglected area.”

“The potential impact of this research will extend beyond just the automotive industry, it will be important for so many areas from construction to aerospace and marine technologies.

“We will be developing tools and methods to tackle the issue of high frequency noise and vibration. Not only will industry gain from this research – through decreased product time to market, increased product reliability, and reduced material waste and cost – ultimately the general public will benefit from products and places sounding better, and reducing the harms due to environmental noise.”

Complex structures require a modelling approach that starts with simulation or measurement of individual components and then combines these to realise a model for the full structure. This component-based approach is used extensively in design today across sectors via various commercial software. However, the available methods are restricted to low-to-mid frequencies due to the limitations of current experimental and numerical techniques. There is no suitable framework for mid-to-high frequency vibro-acoustic simulation.

This is a joint project with Nottingham University’s Applied Maths department. Professor Gregor Tanner from Nottingham University, said: “Predicting, how a car sounds is actually a very hard problem, even with the simulation tool boxes available today. The project xDEA will develop experimental characterisation methods that integrate with a numerical tool developed in Nottingham – the Dynamical Energy Analysis – delivering accurate predictions for mid-to-high frequency noise and vibration in complex structures.”