Field balancing of vehicle transmission shaft based on the influence coefficient method

Abstract

Imbalance of transmission shaft may result in serious bearing failures and poor vehicle noise, vibration, and harshness performance. Usually, shafts in a multi-shaft system are balanced separately before been assembled in vehicle. This causes potential out of balance issue in the full vehicle level in the field due to tolerance stacking up and dynamic imbalance coupling. In this article, a system level balancing method, the influence coefficient method, is introduced and applied to solve the problem of excessive floor panel vibration. The balancing result shows that the first-order vibration from vehicle transmission shaft imbalance obviously decreased. Method applied in this article is simple and practical and could be used for other applications to prevent bearing failure or noise, vibration, and harshness issue due to vehicle level imbalance.