NVH Performance Improvement Study Using a Dual Mass Flywheel (DMF), Inertia Ring Type Tuned Torsional Vibration Damper (TVD) and Single Mass Flywheel (SMF) in a Front Engine and Rear Wheel Driveline Architecture

At present, a Dual Mass Flywheel (DMF) system is widely known to provide benefits on driveline induced noise, vibration and drivability over a Single Mass Flywheel (SMF). A well-tuned DMF provides nice isolation of torsional vibrations generated in periodic combustion process of automobile IC engines. Similarly, a torsional vibration damper mounted on driveline component reduces the torsional excitation and results a lower torsional vibration at driveline components. Noise and vibration issues like boom noise and high vibrations at low engine RPM range drive are often resulted due to high engine firing order torsional excitation input to the driveline. More often, this becomes one of the most objectionable noise and vibration issues in vehicle and should be eliminated or reduced for better NVH performance. A 4 cylinder, 4 stroke small diesel engine equipped with SMF is found to have high engine firing order torsional excitation. The engine is chosen to carry out a comparative study of NVH performance improvements by using a DMF, SMF and TVD in standalone and possible combinations in a front engine and rear-wheel-drive vehicle. A detailed study has been carried out in terms of packaging and hardware between DMF and SMF to make the DMF to be able to work in the engine initially fitted with SMF. The paper is categorized in three segments. First section describes the details of a standard DMF and TVD build configurations and its associated NVH aspects. Second section describes the feasibility study of DMF to be able to work in the engine and in a rear wheel driveline architecture. The final section describes the NVH performance comparison of DMF, SMF and TVD.