Abstract
Power plant mounts of automobiles need 1) to minimize shocks from the power plant when shifting and accelerating, 2) to transmit minimum vibration to the body at idling, 3) to reduce road-induced body vibration, and 4) to transmit minimum engine and transmission noise. Up until now, no single method has been available to tune power plant mounts to cover these requirements.
This paper describes a method that optimizes the mounts which support a power plant of longitudinal layout in a vehicle according to the center-of-gravity suspension theory for minimized vibration transmission in the low frequency range, which relates to requirements 1) to 3) mentioned above. To create this method, we have analyzed how the power plant mounts transmit engine and road induced vibrations to the body and, based on the results, have developed a calculation program and verified it though experiments. Utilizing this simulation program, we have formulated one single set of equations to determine the optimal stiffness of the power plant mountings.