Stability analysis of a clutch system with uncertain parameters using sparse polynomial chaos expansions

Abstract

In vehicle transmission systems, frictional forces acting during the sliding phase of the clutch engagement may produce unwanted vibrations. The prediction of the stability of a clutch system remains however a laborious task, as the parameters which have the highest impact on the stability, such as the friction law or the damping, lead to significant dispersions and must be considered as uncertain in such studies. Non-intrusive generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) expansions have already been used in this context. However, the number of deterministic model evaluations (i.e. the computational cost) required to compute the PC coefficients becomes prohibitive for large numbers of uncertain parameters. The sparse polynomial chaos, recently developed by Blatman and Sudret, may overcome this issue. In this paper, the method has been applied to the stability analysis of a clutch system owning up to eight uncertain parameters. Comparisons with the reference Monte Carlo method and classic full PC expansions show that sparse PC expansions allow substantial computational cost reductions while ensuring a high accuracy of the results.