Balancing of Novel Engine Designs

Abstract

Many manufacturers of heavy duty vehicles are continually developing their engines in order to meet regulations and customer demands. Up until recently the primary focus has been on development of the design of the engines to meet government emission regulations and is now shifting more towards the improvement of the overall engine efficiency. These engines might demand new engine design architectures and balancing of these can however become an issue for such novel engine designs. Truck engines develop high inertial forces which make it more essential that the engine is well balanced. As the new concept designs deviate more from the conventional designs, the existing methods of balancing become unusable due to software limitations. This study was conducted with the Tribology and Mechanics research group, at the Advanced Technology and Research department at Volvo Group Trucks Technology to investigate a new generic approach to analyse vibrations and to develop balancing solutions for novel engine designs using the multi body simulation software Adams/View. The approach has been validated to give a preface towards understanding of vibrations of new complex engine design and their ability to be balanced. It facilitates the understanding of those new designs as the forces and acting moments due to various motions can be distinguished and also derived from the respective vibrational orders. The balancing approach has also been utilized to investigate different crankshaft configurations in order to find the optimal design for the cause of balancing. The analysis investigated different amounts of counter weights on a six cylinder engine and showed that twelve counter weights are beneficial from a balancing standpoint. The different concepts that were studied have been proven to be in balance, although with different amount of additional balance shafts for some designs.