Jürgen Kroll

Drive Train Vibrations: Solving the Conflict Between Efficiency and Drivability

The current status of the conflict between drivability and efficiency will be shown here. Future legal regulations will require even higher fuel efficiency from tomorrow’s vehicles. A major source of potential for enabling this fuel efficiency to be achieved is the operation of the internal combustion engine at lower speeds (rpm). For years, progress in this field has been hampered by the lack of suitable damper technology that would allow engines to be operated in this way while ensuring an acceptable level of comfort for the driver. The introduction of the CPA (Centrifugal Pendulum-Type Absorber) technology by LuK could provide the solution to this conflict. Various applications and design variants of this technology for manual transmissions and double clutch transmissions are available. The connection between the achievable isolation in the drive train with the influencing parameters is shown using a simplified energy-based approach. It is of great importance to include this technology at a very early stage of the development in order to achieve an optimum solution for the complete drive train. Through the integration of a CPA into a DMF, driving comfort can be improved considerably while allowing concepts such as downspeeding (to improve fuel efficiency by an additional 10 %) to be adopted. The CPA can also be integrated into a torsional clutch disk, which provides a cost-effective alternative to a plain DMF.