Nonlinear Dynamics of One-Way Clutches in Belt-Pulley Systems Available to Purchase

One-way clutches are frequently used in the serpentine belt accessory drives of automobiles and heavy vehicles. The clutch plays a role similar to a vibration absorber in order to reduce belt/pulley vibration and noise and increase belt life. This paper analyzes a two-pulley system where the driven pulley has a one-way clutch between the pulley and accessory shaft that engages only for positive relative displacement between these components. The belt is modeled with linear springs that transmit torque from the driving pulley to the accessory pulley. The one-way clutch is modeled as a piecewise linear spring with discontinuous stiffness that separates the driven pulley into two degrees of freedom (DOF). The harmonic balance method (HBM) combined with arc-length continuation is employed to illustrate the nonlinear dynamic behavior of the one-way clutch. HBM with arc-length continuation yields the stable and unstable periodic solutions for given parameters. These solutions are examined across a range of excitation frequencies. The results are confirmed by numerical integration and the widely used bifurcation software AUTO. At the first primary resonance, most of the responses are aperiodic, including quasiperiodic and chaotic solutions. At the second primary resonance, the peak bends to the left with classical softening nonlinearity because clutch disengagement decouples the pulley and the accessory over portions of the response period. The dependence on system parameters such as clutch stiffness, excitation amplitude, and inertia ratio between the pulley and accessory is studied to characterize the nonlinear dynamics across a range of conditions.