As silent as shadow: Rolls-Royce's new Ghost will be one of the quietest cars
Rolls-Royce has come up with its final animated film offering insight into the substance of the new Ghost sedan revealing the unique engineering formula for serenity. The company promises that the sedan will be one of the quietest cars on the road.
To achieve this, the Rolls-Royce team began by adapting the sedan's aluminium spaceframe architecture, which itself offers benefits owing to the metal’s higher acoustic impedance compared with steel and its construction from complex forms rather than flat, resonant surfaces.
A double-skinned bulkhead section was selected to insulate the cabin from the already near-silent 6.75-litre V12 engine and cavities in the roof, boot and floor were created to fill with more than 100kg of sound-absorbing materials. Additionally, double-glazed windows with a clear composite centre sheet were used as well as tyres lined with lightweight acoustic insulation foam.
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Once the sound stage was created, all other components that produced unacceptable levels of noise were discarded and completely redesigned. Even the inside of the air conditioning ducts were smoothed to better insulate clients from intrusive noises.
However, upon early testing the Rolls-Royce team discovered that removing all noise was disorientating. Their solution was to create a ‘whisper’ – a soft undertone that clients experienced as a single, subtle note. To achieve this, each component had to be tuned to a specific resonant frequency. This task included the creation of acoustically tuned damping units for the seat frames, as well as a suite of ports between the cabin and the large 500-litre boot to ensure the low frequency it generated was consistent with new Ghost’s ‘note’.
The marque’s experts named this exhaustive process the Formula for Serenity. Following its creation, these specialists presented the acoustic advances they had made, showcasing how these remarkable developments would serve the demands of new Ghost clients. Rolls-Royce has elected to share elements of these internal briefings to demonstrate the engineering substance that underpins this extraordinary new motor car ahead of its official unveiling in autumn this year.
New Ghost Acoustic Engineering Lead, Tom Davis-Reason, says, “The extraordinary acoustic quality of new Ghost is the result of significant engineering developments and fastidious attention to detail, but it really is underpinned by the marque’s proprietary aluminium architecture. There is simply no way we could have created such an acoustically refined environment using a steel platform."
