An optimization design method for a body mounting system of a heavy vehicle

Noise, vibration, and harshness is one of the main issues of heavy vehicles since their working conditions are very complex and tough. However, most previous works were focused on the optimization design methods of the engine mounting system and few works were reported to study those of the body mounting system. In practice, the body mounting system can significantly affect the noise, vibration, and harshness performance of the vehicle. An inappropriate body mounting system can produce unacceptable noise, vibration, and harshness performance and even result in serious accidents. To overcome this issue, an optimization design method for a body mounting system of a heavy vehicle is proposed to investigate the effect of the body mounting system on the noise, vibration, and harshness performance. Based on the geometrics of the vehicle body, the initial material parameters, shapes, and sizes of the rubber absorber of the body mounting system are determined by the vibration transmissibility ratio and static deformation ratio from an analytical method in the literature. The von Mises stresses of the initial rubber absorber cases from a static finite element analysis are used to select the optimal rubber absorber cases. A multibody dynamic method is proposed to validate the noise, vibration, and harshness performance of the optimal rubber absorber cases. The results show that the presented optimization design method for the body mounting system can be used to optimize the noise, vibration, and harshness performance of the heavy vehicles.