Abstract

Vacuum pumps represent an important engine component, used to create the vacuum inside a volume whose dimension depends by the engine size and the number of engine auxiliary systems working by the difference of pressure between surfaces. Inside internal investigation activities for a Porsche Vacuum pump, a correlation between experimental results and Multibody simulations has been done by taking care of the flexibility of a pump component, the cover, that represents the most flexible body of the entire structure. Germany experimental Department has instrumented the cover by strain gauges around an interesting zone where a crack occurs, and a test was run directly by Porsche on the engine. The simulation activity has been focused on the evaluation of the cover strain status by the matching of the structural modal analysis done in ANSYS and the internal body dynamic for several working conditions and internal geometries.
The full cover strain maps has been extracted from the Flexible Dynamic Analysis in MSC Adams, and compared to experimental results close to the instrumented area to look for a correlation between the local deformation status, and to find a validation of the Multibody model that is built by several types of knowledge (rigid dynamic, structural response).