Christoph Grünert

• Scope of this thesis is the application of the component based transfer path analysis (TPA) on a vehicle steering gear system to derive equivalent forces for the purpose of source characterization. To avoid the efforts of disassembling the source structure from the receiver, which come along with the classical TPA approach, the component based TPA can be measured in-situ on the complete vehicle. Further benefit of the applied method is the determination of independent forces. Thus the result is free of any feedback effects of the surrounding receiver structure. The forces can be obtained from any installation and can be used for virtual acoustic prototyping. In the first phase of this work the main contribution paths are identified by a classical TPA approach. The second part validates the equivalent forces on a principal test. Ultimately the component based TPA is applied on a steering gear mounted in a vehicle as well as on a testbed to derive independent operational forces.