Rolls Royce cars are famous for their luxurious interior and the serenity you find inside. In order to obtain this feature, Rolls Royce has to create a very good insulation. This is also happening for the new generation Ghost.
To achieve a sense of absolute serenity, the acoustic team began by adapting the marque’s proprietary 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.
Once the sound stage was created, every component was obsessively interrogated for its acoustic properties. Those that produced unacceptable levels of noise were discarded and completely redesigned at the Home of Rolls-Royce in Goodwood, West Sussex, to better serve the client’s desire for serenity. Even the inside of the air conditioning ducts were smoothed to better insulate clients from intrusive noises.
However, upon early testing the acoustic 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.
