Study On Subjective Evaluation Method For Comprehensive Annoyance Of Vehicle Interior Noise

Vehicle sound quality is a new developing research area in the recent years. With therapid development of automotive industry and the improvement of people’s living quality,people pay attention not only to the vehicle performances, such as the traction, braking andeconomy, etc., but also to the ride comfort. The sound quality of interior noise is one of theimportant indices for evaluating ride comfort of vehicles. The main research content ofvehicle sound quality is to study evaluation methods of the interior noise and establish agood, comfortable and satisfied interior acoustic environment of the vehicle. Obviously, itis the future direction of vehicle acoustical design. Thus, to study the subjective evaluationmethod of vehicle interior noise still has theoretical and practical significance.The subjective evaluation methods for sound quality mainly include rank order, ratingscales, paired comparison, semantic differential methods and their improved versions, suchas the grouped pair-comparison (GPC), anchored semantic differential (ASD) methods, etc.According to the interior noise measurement standards of vehicles and the some specialrequirements of the related subjective evaluation methods, firstly, a noise acquisitionscheme is designed for measuring both the stationary and the nonstationary interior noisesof sample vehicles. The measured and pre-processed noise signals are saved in a vehiclenoise database. In order to make easy operation and reduce workload in the followingsubjective evaluation tests, a set of software for subjective evaluation of sound quality isdeveloped. Based on the software, the rank order, rating scales, paired comparison andanchored semantic differential methods are respectively used for evaluating annoyanceindex of the interior noises. According to the results from the statistical analysis of the tests,correlation analysis of the subjective and objective evaluations and theoretical comparisonamong the subjective evaluation methods, a conclusion can be drawn that the ASD method is more suitable for dealing with the vehicle interior noise. Thus, the ASD method is usedto subjectively evaluate the interior noise annoyances of four types of sample vehicles.Furthermore, based on the subjective evaluation results and the fuzzy comprehensivealgorithm, a fuzzy comprehensive annoyance evaluation model is established, which candirectly provide a total value of comprehensive annoyance of a whole vehicle.The study results suggest that, each subjective evaluation method has its own usingsituations; different types of vehicle are working in different sound quality characteristics;the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method is suitable for processing the normalizationproblem of subjective evaluation tests. The proposed fuzzy comprehensive annoyancemodel, which can directly be used in evaluation of vehicle interior noises, has a goodapplication prospect.