AVAS design and optimization is a critical part of electric and hybrid vehicle development for regulatory purposes. Trial-and-error testing is often done to ensure compliance. However, this comes late in the vehicle design phase, take time, effort, and specialized test equipment and facilities, and is subject to testing variance which may overestimate or underestimate AVAS design viability. Increasingly, vehicle manufacturers and suppliers look to support AVAS design using simulation techniques. These can indicate during early design phases the sound levels at the AVAS certification measurement points from a given transducer and the sensitivity to different locations and angles of orientation. In the same simulation, the sound pressure on the vehicle glasses and body panels can be predicted, which can be combined with other simulation methods to predict how much noise from the AVAS transducer is transmitted to the interior and perceived by the vehicle occupants. In combination with objective optimization of transducer positioning for AVAS with acoustic transfer function simulation, subjective evaluation may also be carried out early in the design phase by combining candidate or measured AVAS transducer signals and inputs with the simulated acoustic transfer functions, which act as a filter from the output at the transducer to yield the virtual expected result at the AVAS measurement positions. This allows psychoacoustic evaluation of the expected sound at the AVAS measurement positions.
