Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:  So, my daughter and her beau buy a house, and they need a dishwasher. “Pops,” she calls me that, “tell me about dishwashers.” What she has in mind is an el cheapo model. Au contraire, I tell her. Get something that has a noise level in the 40 to 50db range so that she could talk or watch TV with it running. Brand X is as loud as a shop vac. Naturally, I get to buy the unit for her. Suckered me right into it.
The thing is that noise and vibration are not what you think about when shopping for something … until you buy a noisy and clanky contraption. Consumers -- never mind government regulations -- burned before are demanding our electro-mechanical world to be filled with quieter and quieter appliances, cars, HVACs, and so forth. That’s an engineering problem demanding a fine balance between specifications, design, regulations, and affordability. This where VA One from ESI Group fits into the analysis spectrum. It’s a full frequency vibroacoustics analysis environment. VA One is modular. Its core functionality embraces six main modules, three of which provide acoustic BE (boundary elements), acoustic FE (finite elements), and structural FE tools and solvers. Its statistical energy analysis (SEA) module helps you create system-level models of noise and vibration transmission in large, complex systems at mid and high frequencies. Its foam module extends VA One's library of materials with advanced poroelastic materials based on full Biot theory. But the kicker is the VA One Hybrid module. This module lets you create and solve fully coupled FE/BEM/SEA models in a single analysis. (And yes, there are modules for CAD import, specialized analyses like shock and for solving models in parallel across a cluster or network.) Now comes the 2012 version of VA One. It adds to this line-up a fully integrated design optimization module. This module is for people with tough balancing acts, such as balancing design and mass in a car’s interior sound package to meet performance goals. ESI says it’s quick and easy to use. Other enhancements in VA One 2012 include a new adaptive integration scheme that’s said to make the BEM solvers return faster solutions. New functionality lets you edit the attributes of multiple SEA subsystems quickly, reducing the time required to build and modify SEA models. You can read more about VA One 2012 from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. But, please, read to yourself. Keep it quiet over there. I’m trying to do the dishes. Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood Anthony J. Lockwood
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