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Why truck cabin comfort matters: the example of Volvo Trucks

By Joelle Beuzit

Truck cabin comfort matters. It minimizes the drivers’ stress and fatigue levels for better health and safety. Learn how Volvo Trucks achieves this goal with Simcenter tools.

Meet Vera

This is Vera.

The Vera autonomous truck

Vera is an electric, autonomous vehicle. It is designed to optimize transport in highly-repetitive, short distance flows with large volumes of goods.

Vera, and its inventor, the company Volvo Trucks, will certainly influence the future of road transportation and ensure that it becomes safer, quieter and more efficient.

But until Vera is here, trucks will be driven by humans. Humans who get tired, bored, hungry, sleepy. Who make errors. And who are also capable of enjoying the agreeable sensations of a smooth ride.

Cabin comfort matters – even in trucks

Theresia Manns is one of these persons who believe that truck driving should be a safe, comfortable and enjoyable experience.

In her role as an NVH engineer within the Volvo Trucks Company, she understands the impact of ride comfort on attributes such as quality perception, driving pleasure and safety.

“My focus is to improve the sound quality in the truck’s cabin. Sound quality is definitely not a negligible aspect of truck design and development. Poor sound quality and the occurrence of disturbing noises cause additional stress and mental fatigue for the driver.”

Theresia Manns
A Volvo Trucks driving on the road

Therefore, Manns and her colleagues work to investigate the origin of noise problems and propose appropriate countermeasures. Their ultimate goal is to minimize the negative impact of acoustic annoyances inside the cabin on the driver’s stress and fatigue.

In fact, the NVH engineering team at Volvo Trucks relies on Simcenter Testing Solutions to improve cabin sound quality. It quickly identifies and analyzes the origin of annoying noise, with the help of the Simcenter Solid Sphere Array and Simcenter Testlab 3D Acoustic Camera software.

The easy visualization feature of the Simcenter Sound Camera software is used to improve truck cabin comfort

Do you want to learn more about how Volvo Trucks uses Simcenter Testlab and Simcenter SCADAS  to improve cabin sound quality? Read on the Siemens PLM website the full story.

Learn more about the Simcenter solutions for sound source localization.

Learn more about Vera on the Volvo Trucks website or watch the video below.

This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/simcenter/why-sound-quality-in-trucks-cabins-matters-the-example-of-volvo-trucks/