Curtin University

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Fundamentals of Mechanical Vibration

ASSIGNMENT 2

Below (next page) is a schematic diagram of an actual marine propulsion system

consisting of an 8-cylinder in-line engine, flywheel, coupling, gearbox, shaft and water
jet. A torsional vibration damper is attached to the non-drive end of the engine.
Use Holzers method to estimate the lowest four torsional natural frequencies of this
system to the nearest 0.1Hz.
Also determine and sketch the mode shapes for each of the four natural frequencies,
assuming unit amplitude for the damper (mass element number 100).
Assuming that the engine is a four-stroke type (giving four power strokes per
revolution in this 8-cylinder case), determine the engine running speeds, in rpm, that
would cause the frequency of engine combustion torque pulses to coincide with these
four system natural torsional frequencies.
So that each student has a different system, the moment of inertia of mass element
number 500 (the flywheel) shall be replaced with one of the following magnitude.
Your 8 digit student number can be written as 'pqrstuvw'. Then let your flywheel
moment of inertia be:
I 500 = 3 + 0.1(10v + w) kgm2

Where a section of shaft is labelled as rigid simply combine the adjacent inertias and
omit the shaft. By my count, you will then end up with 23 inertias.
You may (and probably should! lifes too short) use any software, including the
Matlab program Holzer3.m provided on Blackboard (see week 4). However, you
must verify the answer in some way. Never trust software! The eigenvalue method
covered in tutorial 5 is a good alternative.

Due Date:

3.30 pm, Friday 29th May 2015.

Learning outcomes addressed by this task:

Be able to apply Holzers method to the solution of natural frequencies of multi-dof systems.

Reinforce some earlier principles of statics and dynamics.

Practise generating a professional-quality engineering report.

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Mass element
number

stiffness
MNm/rad

Moment of inertia
kgm2

Some Notes
Your submission should form an engineering design record. Your supervisor wants
to know what you did, the result, and the limitations on your analysis. This is
sometimes called the executive summary near the beginning of the report. The
remainder of the report should allow another engineer, who has had nothing to do with
the job, to understand exactly what you have done, why you made assumptions and
simplifications, and your results. Whatever is needed to communicate that information
should be contained within the report.
By year three of this course, it is assumed that your neatness and presentation standard
will be appropriate. (This is possible by hand writing. If it is not possible for you,
then you should resort to typing.) Hence no marks are allocated to presentation.
However, marks will be deducted for poor presentation.

End of Assignment

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