Vibration Analysis of an Engine Mount

Nowadays, the highly competitive automotive business industry requires manufacturers to pay more attention to passenger comfort and riding quality. This has forced designers to direct their attention to the development of high quality engine mounting devices, with traditional physical prototyping and testing being gradually replaced by virtual prototyping and numerical simulations. Following this trend, this article presents the work that has been done in order to create a finite element model of an available automotive elastomeric engine mount so that a deeper understanding on the dynamics of these components can be obtained to form a basis for improved design and development of future mounts. In this work, special attention is given to the accurate modelling of nonlinear effects on the static behaviour of the mount with a comparison being performed between experimental and numerical tests. Based on the finite element model created, the mount’s frequency response function curves are determined and multi-dimensional effects in the mount’s response are observed. Also, the mount’s time dependent response to step-like moderate amplitude loads is obtained. The overall results indicate that the modelled mount has an acceptable performance in both isolating engine induced vibration and suppressing high amplitude engine shake movement. Finally, some remarks are made about the use of parallel associated rubbers and nonlinear dynamic properties as a mean for improving the mount’s dynamic behaviour.