REDUCTION OF PRESSURE PULSATIONS ON AUTOMOTIVE TRANSMISSION OIL VANE PUMP

Abstract

The balanced oil pump is an important component of the automatic transmission in modern automotive vehicles. During the pump operation, pressure pulsations are generated, which negatively affect the working characteristics of a pump, including pump noise and durability. Thus, pressure pulsations must be minimized in order to ensure smooth operation of the pump, low noise and increased durability. The current work uses Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to explore the effects of port design on pump pressure pulsations for binary transmission vane pump. Several different approaches are considered, such as port length at intake and discharge, implementation of metering grooves at discharge and intake ports, along with different shapes of metering grooves. More than 20 CFD cases are analyzed to study the effect of different port design on pressure pulsations of the pump. Validation against experimental data is performed to provide confidence in the CFD modeling results. It is found that ports can be designed more precisely using CFD than described using the simple models that are typically used for pump analysis. Implementing metering grooves helps decreasing pressure pulsations. There is no significant difference in the pressure pulsation generated with different shapes of metering grooves in the pump non‐cavitation regime. Future work could consider the effects of the metering grooves geometry on feasibility and durability within the cavitation regime.