Violent axial vibration of a vehicle engine crankshaft might lead to multiple defects to the engine.Much research on mechanism and control measures has been done on engines,such as using the dynamic stiffness matrix method,rayleigh differential method,and system matrix method.But the source of axial vibration has not been identified clearly because there are many excitation factors for the axial vibration of a crankshaft,such as coupled torsional-axial vibration and coupled bending-axial vibration,etc.In order to improve the calculation reliability and identify the excitation source of axial vibration of in vehicle engine crankshafts,this paper presents a method to identify the axial vibration excitation source of crankshafts for high speed diesel engines based on an auto-regressive and moving average（ARMA） model.Through determining initial moving average variables and measuring axial /bending/torsional vibrations of a crankshaft at the free-end of a 4-cylinder diesel engine,autoregressive spectrum analysis is applied to the measured vibration signal.The results show that the axial vibration of the crankshaft is mainly excited by coupled bending vibration at high speed.But at low speed,the axial vibration in some frequencies is excited primarily by torsional excitation.Through investigation of axial vibration source of engine crankshafts,calculation accuracy of vibration can be improved significantly.
