A novel design of semi-active hydraulic mount with wide-band tunable notch frequency

Hydraulic engine mount is advanced vibration isolator with superior performance to reduce vibration transferred from engine to chassis. As the stiffness at notch frequency is small, some semi-active or active hydraulic mounts tune some parameters to let notch frequency coincide with exciting frequency for better vibration isolation performance. It is discovered the current semi-active mounts can tune the notch frequency in narrow frequency band when only one parameter is tuned. A novel semi-active hydraulic engine mount design which introduces screw thread is proposed and researched in the paper. This hydraulic mount can control both cross section area and the length of inertia track and the theoretical tunable notch frequency band is [0, ∞). Theoretical work is carried out to uncover the capability for the proposed design to tune notch frequency. Simulation work is performed to understand its high vibration isolation performance. For the purpose of energy conservation, the friction self-locking is introduced. This denotes once the mount is tuned at optimal condition, the energy can be cut off and the optimal condition will never change. We also determine the best time to tune the parameters of the proposed mount in order to decrease the acting force. The proposed semi-active mount has capability to obtain wide band tunable notch frequency and has merit of energy conservation.