The investment, which followed several other upgrades across the engineering organisation – including to all 12 engine dynos, its portable emissions measurement system and developments in crash test – now enables Millbrook to develop vehicle noise slutions beyond the regulatory requirements.
Ravi Bal, senior engineer at Millbrook, says the developments will be particularly useful for electric and hybrid vehicles, enabling engineers to measure acoustics and vibration inside a vehicle and syncing it with data recorded outside.
"Noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) testing is a key area of development for Millbrook and we are working with many customers to conduct a variety of objective measurements in a repeatable test environment," explains Bal.
"In 2012, we introduced the UK's first commercially available ISO 10844:2011 specification noise surface, providing the most advanced facilities for investigating and understanding vehicle noise," he continues.
"While the anticipated update to legislative type approval requirements did not go ahead as predicted in 2014, Millbrook is keen to remain at the forefront of the latest technology for the test and development of noise, and have invested in state of the art data acquisition hardware, and software, to provide a wide range of capabilities."