Modal analysis of serpentine belt drive systems

The modal analysis of linear prototypical serpentine belt drive systems is performed in this study. The entire system is divided into two subsystems: one with a single belt and its motion is not coupled to the rest of the system in the linear analysis; the other with the remaining components. The explicit exact characteristic equation for eigenvalues is derived, which does not use the iteration approach. This characteristic equation can provide insight concerning the effect of design parameters on natural frequencies of the system. The response of serpentine belt drive systems to arbitrary excitations is obtained as a superposition of orthogonal eigenfunctions. The exact solution without using eigenfunction expansion is derived when the excitations are non-resonance harmonic. This explicit expression is particularly useful in the direct perturbation analysis of the corresponding non-linear problems. (C) 1999 Academic Press.