Exploring a Vibration Synthesis Process for the Acoustic Characterization of Electric Drives

A comprehensive vibration synthesis process for synthesizing the electromagnetically excited acoustic vibrations in electric drives is explored in this paper. The study is performed on a traction drive for a hybrid electric vehicle. The work derives and highlights several key aspects for modeling and assessing the acoustic characteristics of electric drives. The influence of different force excitation shapes on the resulting overall vibration is shown, and the importance of including tangential forces in the synthesis process is highlighted. The resulting operational deflections at selected operating points are analyzed and compared to measurements. The load level dependence of the noise components is investigated. Finally, acoustic maps are introduced as a means to display and compare predicted and measured acoustic characteristics of variable-speed drives. The synthesized acoustic maps are validated by comparison against their measured counterparts.