Dynamic behaviour of V-belt drive system in the presence of sheaves’ lateral misalignment

Abstract

This paper presents the effects of lateral misalignment of sheaves, on the transverse span displacements of a serpentine belt drive system that contains a driving sheave, a driven sheave, a belt, and a dynamic tensioner. This defect gives rise to dangerous operating conditions for the system. A hybrid discrete—continuous model is adopted, in which the coupling between the discrete variables describing the rotational motion of the three sheaves and the tensioner arm and the continuous variables describing the transverse motion of the belt spans is taken into account. An analytical method based on the perturbation method is used to determine the explicit expressions of the transverse span displacements and permits the study of the effects of design variables on the dynamic behaviour of the system in the presence of the defect described earlier.