Proposed Workflow and Performance Targets System for NVH Development of Vehicle Drive Axle 2018-01-0992

In the driveline system of all-wheel drive or rear-wheel drive vehicle, drive axle is a major transmission component. Within the perspective of noise and vibration, drive axle is not only a transfer path of the excitation from engine, but also an excitation source because of the engaging movement of its inner gear sets. As a precision assembly, the design parameters and manufacture processes of drive axle have a great impact on the NVH performance of vehicle. This paper proposes a workflow and a cascaded targets system for NVH development of vehicle drive axle. In order to efficiently and fundamentally control the NVH performance related to drive axle, this work first studied various kinematical and structural characteristics of component parts to conclude the key design parameters. To obtain the acceptable range of these parameters, a mount of CAE simulation work, including finite element analysis, multi-body simulation and professional gear design software simulation, were performed on the basis of analyzing and summarizing the previous research work. Once the prototype axle with the optimized parameters was assembled, practical NVH tests were performed on both of the bench and vehicle to validate the design. To satisfy the need of the mass production, an end-of-line test procedure was developed based on a correlation analysis between the NVH performance and the detection parameters of the test. Finally, the workflow and inspection standards were summarized in this paper, which could be referred by axle engineers in the early phase of production development.