Review of automotive vehicle engine mounting systems

The ideal engine mount system should isolate engine vibration caused by eng ine disturbance force in engine speed range and prevent engine bounce from shock excitation. This implies that the dynamic stiffness and damping of th e engine mount should be frequency and amplitude dependent. The development of engine mounting systems has mostly concentrated an improvement of frequ ency and amplitude dependent properties. The conventional elastomeric mount s do not meet all the requirements and can only offer a trade-off between s tatic deflection and vibration isolation, but there is still same room for improving the properties of elastomeric mounts. Passive hydraulic mounts ca n provide a better performance than elastomeric mounts especially in the lo w frequency range. Semi active techniques are usually used to further impro ve performance of hydraulic mounts by making them more tunable. The active engine mounting system can be very stiff at low frequency and be tuned to b e very soft at the higher frequency range to isolate the vibration. The act ive engine mounts have been considered as the next generation of engine mou nts. The optimization of engine mounting system is quite useful both in ter ms of speed and more effective design. The current work an optimization of the engine mount systems shows some limitation. Further work is needed to c onsider the nonlinear variations in properties of different types of mounti ng systems.