A Simulated Annealing algorithm based optimization for vehicle Powertrain Mounting System

To improve the ride comfort of internal combustion engine powered vehicle, it is an effective method to employ the proper Powertrain Mounting Systems (PMS) to reduce the vibration transmitted from the powertrain to the vehicle chassis. The parameters of PMS have important influence to the performance of vibration absorption. Simulated Annealing (SA) is an effective optimization method and is widely used in engineering practice. In this paper, the parameter optimization of PMS based on SA method is presented. The optimization objective is to find the best decoupling ratio in the six directions of PMS, respectively. The design variables are the stiffness of the individual mounts. The constraints are that the desired decoupled ratio and the corresponding frequency should be allocated in the specific regions. However, the difficulty for the optimization is that the decoupling ratio and the corresponding frequency serve as both of objective function and constraints. To solve the problem, a penalty function is employed. Finally, by using SA optimization, the best parameters of PMS can be obtained. A case study is given to validate the proposed method. The result shows that the decoupling ratio can be improved significantly, while the constraints are well satisfied, respectively. Consequently, we can get the conclusion that the proposed method is effective for the optimization of PMS.