Title: Vibration isolation of exhaust pipe under vehicle chassis

Authors: Shih-Fu Ling, Tso-Chien Pan, Geok-Hian Lim, Ching-Huan Tseng

Addresses: School of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 2263, Singapore. ' School of Civil and Structural Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 2263, Singapore. ' School of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 2263, Singapore. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Chiao Tong University, Taiwan, Republic of China

Abstract: The comfort of passengers is greatly affected by the characteristic vibrations transmitted from the exhaust pipe system to the vehicle body structure. Beam element is used to model the structural properties of the exhaust pipe. Rubber mountings, which link the exhaust pipe to the floor panel of the vehicle, are each characterized by a spring element with three translational and three rotational spring rates along their respective axes. Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) and multi-objective optimization are employed to search for the optimal stiffnesses and the locations of the rubber mountings, to achieve minimum transmitted vibrational forces and moments. The results reveal that the rubber mounting locations followed by stiffnesses have considerable influence upon vibration isolation performance.

Keywords: exhaust systems; finite element method; FEM; modelling; multi-objective optimisation; sequential quadratic programming; SQP; vibration isolation; exhaust pipes; vehicle exhaust; vehicle vibration; optimal stiffness; rubber mountings; vehicle design.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVD.1994.061911

International Journal of Vehicle Design, 1994 Vol.15 No.1/2, pp.131 - 142

Published online: 28 May 2014 *

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