Reliability-based evaluation of automotive wind noise quality

This paper proposes an efficient method for the reliability analysis of a vehicle body–door subsystem with respect to an important quality issue—wind noise. A nonlinear seal model is constructed for the automotive wind noise problem and the limit state function is evaluated using finite element analysis. A multi-modal adaptive importance sampling (AIS) method is developed for reliability analysis at system level, to improve the efficiency of the Monte Carlo simulation. The method can easily handle implicit and time-dependent limit-state functions, with variables of any statistical distributions. Existing analytical as well as simulation-based methods are also investigated to solve the car door wind noise problem. It is demonstrated through this industrial application problem that the multi-modal AIS method is superior to existing methods in terms of efficiency and accuracy. A generalized framework for reliability estimation is then established for series system reliability problems with large numbers of random variables and complicated, implicit limit states.