SMOOTH FRICTION CONTROL STRATEGY FOR DM-CLUTCH BASED DRIVELINE SYSTEMS

摘要

Centrifugally operated friction clutches, named DM clutch in this paper, had been developed to couple an engine to an inputshaft of a mechanical transmission for commercial vehicles. The DM clutch based AMT (automated mechanical transmission) has been in production from Eaton for more than a decade in the North American commercial vehicle market. Its working principle is to take advantage of the centrifugal force of sliding masses between two clutch plates to complete the transitions among unlock, slipping and lockup. DM clutch is reliable and durable, but not easy to modulate because of involvement of engine speed controls, nonlinear friction forces and variable vehicle loads. One challenging aspect is the occurrence of torsional vibrations during vehicle launches. In this paper, a friction based damping control strategy [2, 3] utilizing the frictional characteristics is shown to control the DM clutch to achieve smoother vehicle launch. The vehicle testing data shows its effectiveness of smoothening the vehicle launches with and without the loaded trailer under different operational conditions.