Exploring a vibration synthesis process for the acoustic characterization of electric drives

A method to efficiently synthesize electromagnetically excited vibrations in electric drives is explored in this paper. The process integrates well into a drive system´s design phase and allows to characterize the vibrations over the entire torque-speed range. The study is performed on a traction drive for a hybrid electric vehicle. 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 then analyzed. Finally, acoustic maps are introduced as a means to represent and compare predicted and measured acoustic characteristics of speed-variable drives. The synthesized acoustic maps are validated by comparison against their measured counterparts.