Vibration and noise analysis of heavy-duty trucks based on powertrain lightweighting

Vehicle lightweighting has been considered as one of the most important solutions to improve fuel economy and reduce harmful emissions. Considering the PowerTrain System (PTS) lightweighting of a heavy-duty truck tractor, cast iron of which the transmission shell was made is replaced with aluminum. Such weight reduction caused the irrationality of the natural frequency matching and the vehicle NVH performance become worse. In order to evaluate the influence of PTS lightweighting on the vibration and noise, the theoretical analysis and experimental tests have been done. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) method was adopted for the Powertrain Mounting System (PMS) optimization. Considering the installation position of PMS, the limitations of package space, cost and available time, the mounting stiffness was chosen as the design variables. One combination of the main vibration energy distribution of PMS was selected as the objective function of optimization design. After optimization, the vehicle experimental study was carried out to investigate the vibration and noise performance of the PMS at idle and Whole Open Throttle (WOT). The test results show that the optimization of PMS had a significant improvement on the vehicle vibration and noise performance