The hottest - Ricardo

“This achievement was due in no small
part to the investment made by Audi in
recent years in the development of
methodologies for analytical
optimisation of exhaust systems using
Ricardo’s WAVE suite of programs”
Audi’s 3.2-litre FSI V6 engine (left) as
installed in its luxury A8 saloon (above).
made by Audi in recent years in the
development of methodologies for
analytical optimisation of exhaust
systems using Ricardo’s WAVE suite of
programs.
The design and development of
exhaust systems was traditionally a
laborious process in which the
optimisation of new designs was
carried out through the production
and testing of prototype hardware.
While this approach provides an
absolute measure of the all-round
performance of each design, it can be
expensive and time-consuming in an
environment where time to market is
all important. In addition,
experimentally measured acoustic
response results rarely provide a
complete understanding of the
underlying physical mechanisms of
noise generation. As such, and in an
experimentally-led approach, each
successive optimisation step is
informed by judgement rather than
detailed knowledge and
understanding of the internal physics
of the system.
With the increasing robustness of
core solvers, 1D simulation packages
such as WAVE have become the
standard tool of choice for the
performance aspects of base engine
and intake and exhaust system design.
With careful high resolution modelling
of these systems it is also possible to
create acoustic-quality WAVE models
which can predict auditory response
with similar levels of accuracy to the
performance simulations.
Pioneering work
Early pioneering work in the
development of accurate and
repeatable automated methods for the
generation of acoustic-quality WAVE
models based on component
geometry was carried out in the late
1990s by Ricardo and a consortium of
intake and exhaust system
manufacturers and OEMs including
Audi. The benefits of this work,
together with more recent
developments in 3D geometry based
modelling and the integration of CAD
models, continue to be felt both in the
core WAVE solver as well as in its pre-
Q3, 2006 • RICARDO QUARTERLY REVIEW 19