I am Thomas Bischof, Dr.-Ing., and I run the engineering office that carries my name. For twenty-six years I was responsible for acoustic method development at ZF Friedrichshafen, latterly as Manager NVH & Dynamics and head of the group-wide acoustics expert team. I have run my own engineering office since 2002, full-time since 2022.

I started in optical metrology: at the Bremen Institute of Applied Beam Technology I coupled holographic interferometry with finite element calculations to find flaws in adhesive bonds, fibre-reinforced components and pressure vessels without destroying them. That was also the subject of my doctorate at the University of Bremen, followed by a research stay at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts; those years produced more than fifteen publications on holographic interferometry. What stayed with me is an attitude: a measurement only becomes a statement once the model and the experiment point at each other.

At ZF the work extended to drivetrain acoustics, system acoustics and root cause analysis in end-of-line testing. For seven years I also chaired the FVA working group on NVH; the FVA is a nationwide association of companies that coordinates their pre-competitive research. Drawing on that experience, I have spent the last three years pushing the established methods further and feeding the results into the analysis platform s2m: relative transfer functions and tooth mesh excitations, and the automated attribution of an anomaly to its possible causes. The spark that started my engineering office was the development of AutoPlotter, a tool for the automated evaluation of noise measurements, which I sold from 2002 onwards and whose sources have since gone to ZF.

What has not changed is the question at the end of every campaign: can you name the component that causes the problem, and can you show why. Suitable methods were developed to make that answer defensible rather than plausible.