Aspects of Driveline Integration for Optimized Vehicle NVH Characteristics

Customer requirements for quiet and more comfortable vehicles have steadily increased. Requirements for lightweight vehicle designs and the need for more fuel efficient engines are often contradictory to the customer expectations for NVH refinement. The driveline can be a significant source of NVH issues in the vehicle. The increasing complexity of modern driveline systems as well as the existence of several variants in the driveline architecture (front wheel, rear wheel and four-wheel/all-wheel drive, automatic-, manual-, automatic-shifted manual transmission, etc.) can make the driveline integration task very challenging.

Due to the multitude of driveline components and potential driveline excitations sources, several driveline-related noise and vibration problems within different frequency ranges have to be understood and controlled to ensure a well refined vehicle. It is important for the integration process to understand that a design modification to the driveline can have an impact to numerous NVH phenomena.

This paper addresses various NVH phenomena which are related to the vehicle driveline. Common NVH concerns caused by the vehicle driveline are described, and examples from several case studies of driveline related NVH issues are provided.