The comfort of passengers is greatly affected by the characteristic vibrations transmitted from the exhaust pipe system to the vehicle body structure. Beam element is used to model the structural properties of the exhaust pipe. Rubber mountings, which link the exhaustpipe to the floor panel of the vehicle, are each characterized by aspring element with three translational and three rotational springrates along their respective axes. Sequential Quadratic Programming(SQP) and multi-objective optimization are employed to search for the optimal stiffnesses and the locations of the rubber mountings, toachieve minimum transmitted vibrational forces and moments. The results reveal that the rubber mounting locations followed by stiffnesses have considerable influence upon vibration isolation performance.(A)
Abstract