Coupled belt-pulley vibration in serpentine drives with belt bending stiffness

A method is developed to evaluate the natural frequencies and vibration modes of serpentine belt drives where the belt is modeled as a moving beam with bending stiffness. Inclusion of bending stiffness leads to belt-pulley coupling not captured in moving string models. New dynamic characteristics of the system induced by belt bending stiffness are investigated. The belt-pulley coupling is studied through the evolution of the vibration modes. When the belt-pulley coupling is strong, the dynamic behavior of the system is quite different from that of the string model where there is no such coupling. The effects of major design variables on the system are discussed. The spatial discretization can be used to solve other hybrid continuous/discrete eigenvalue problems.