Hoses are very common vehicle components. Unfortunately, they provide a pathway for the transfer of structure-borne noise between active components and the interior of the passenger compartment. Their role in total vehicle acoustics becomes even more important in electric cars, where their contribution to the total noise of electromechanical components is no longer masked by the sounds of the internal combustion engine. Although widely used, hoses are difficult to model, especially with regard to their dynamic behavior, which is usually unknown. In this paper, a methodology for experimentally characterizing dynamic properties of hoses is presented. A newly developed test rig allows these properties to be derived directly from bending, shear, compression and torsion stiffness measurements on a short hose sample, as a function of frequency and amplitude of excitation. The experimentally determined parameters are used to generate numerical models of longer hoses. Mechanical transfer functions of the simulated long hoses are validated by experiments.
