New analytical method to evaluate the powerplant and chassis coupling in the improvement vehicle NVH

The design of an automotive powerplant mounting system is an essential part in vehicle safety and improving the vehicle noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) characteristics. One of the main problems encountered in the automotive design is isolating low frequency vibrations of the powerplant from the rest of the vehicle. The significant powerplant mass makes the choice of frequency and mode arrangements a critical design decision. Several powerplant mounting schemes have been developed to improve NVH properties concentrating on the positioning and design of resilient supports. However these methods are based on decoupling rigid body modes from a grounded powerplant model which ignores chassis and suspension system interactions. But it cannot be stated that decoupling the grounded rigid body modes of the powerplant will systematically reduce chassis vibrations. In this paper, a new analytical method is proposed to examine the mechanisms of coupling between the powerplant and the vehicle chassis and subsystems. The analytical procedure expands the equation of motion of the vehicle components to such that a domain of boundary conditions used in the 6 degrees-of-freedom powerplant mounting model can be defined. An example of this new procedure is given for improving NVH chassis response at idle speed using the torque roll axis decoupling strategy. (c) 2005 Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.