General Description

The Virtual Vehicle Competence Center (ViF) (www.virtuellesfahrzeug.at) was founded in 2002. Since 2008 ViF has been a holding company of the Austrian COMET K2 research program K2-Mobility – Sustainable Vehicle Technologies – an international institution in the field of application-oriented vehicle development. This program offers an attractive cooperation and research platform in the vehicle industry. There are more than 180 employees at ViF, almost 90 % of them involved in research projects dealing with automotive and rail applications. In 2008, the former Acoustic Competence Centre (ACC), which dates back to 1999, was merged with ViF, now forming the Area C NVH & Friction at ViF. Here the work is focused on research and development of models and methods for reducing noise and vibration of vehicles.

Supervisors and Expertise

Dr. Jan Rejlek: vibro-acoustics, numerical mid-frequency modelling, senior researcher at ViF, supervisor of several internship students, involved in 4 EU projects, former Marie Curie Fellow, Eugene Nijman, M.Sc.: vehicle vibro-acoustics, former head of the engine NVH department at the FIAT Research Centre in Italy, currently scientific head of Area C, 5 EU projects, Dr. Josef Girstmair works now for more than 7 years in the field of powertrain dynamics and acoustics. He received his PhD in 2012 in the field of real-time and offline simulation of the vibro-acoustic behaviour of passenger car drivetrains at the Graz University of Technology; Dr. Anton Fuchs has more than ten years of expertise in the field of electrical measurement and received the veniadocendi in the field of process instrumentation and sensing technology at Graz University of Technology in 2009.   

Key Facilities and Infrastructure

Anechoic engine test rig, semi-anechoic drive train test rig, modal analysis test bed, small reverberation chamber, modern data acquisition systems including acoustic holography, acoustic camera, array of particle velocity probes, battery test lab, computational facilities, etc.

Previous Involvement in Research and Training Programmes

In the past, ViF coordinated the FP6 EST Marie Curie project SIM-VIA2 (2006-2010, GA no. MEST CT-2005-020263) and participated in numerous EU projects, such as FP7 ITN MID-FREQUENCY (2008-2012, GA no. 214909), FP7 RTD MID-MOD (2009-2011, GA no. SCP7-2008-218508), SILENCE and VISPeR.

Current Involvement in Research and Training Programmes

Currently, ViF coordinates an FP7 ITN Marie Curie Project GRESIMO (2011-2015, GA no. 290050) and is partner in FP7 ITN/EID project eLiQuiD (2012-2016, GA no. 316422). Apart from the European funded projects, ViF is actively involved in variety of national and regional research programmes.

Publications

1- L. Karas et al. (2011), Vibro-Acoustic Simulation of Aluminium Foam Parts Using MultiScale Techniques, Advanced Engineering Materials, WILEY-VCH Verlag, 2011, 13, pp. 1015-1018.

2-  J. Rejlek (2012), Wave Based Technique for the Numerical Mid-Frequency Modelling of Coupled, Unbounded Vibro-Acoustic Problems, PhD thesis, Graz University of Technology, ISBN 978-3-200-02547-9.

3- E. Nijman (2012), NVH optimisation of system components in view of assembly performance, Innovations in Wave Modelling, September 3-7, 2012, Nottingham.

4- J. Rejlek et al. (2013), A Combined Computational-Experimental Approach for Modelling of Coupled Vibro-Acoustic Problems, In proceedings of the SAE 2013 Noise and Vibration Conference and Exhibition, May 20-23, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, 2013. doi: 10.4271/2013-01-1997.