Numerical modelling and analysis of automotive transmission rattle

This paper describes a research work on modelling and numerical analysis of torsional vibration in automotive manual transmissions. The focus of the effort is on a decoupling procedure for the numerical analysis of gear rattle. The power train model is specified into a linear sub-system and a non-linear sub-system that includes the strong nonlinearities of gear backlash and multi-stage clutch stiffness. The weak coupling of the sub-systems is then exploited for efficient numerical analysis. It is shown that the decoupled model yields an acceptable accuracy with a significant gain in computational efficiency when using an algorithm of numerical integration of stiff differential equations or a finite element in time algorithm. Numerical simulation results for a Daimler-Chrysler vehicle power train are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.