Analytical Model for Combined Ride and Handling in Commercial Vehicle

Vertical vibration felt by driver or passengers, leads to fatigue or discomfort during long-distance travel. The vehicle roll-over at high speeds is a major cause of highway accidents. So, ride comfort and handling are very important characteristics that influence the customer’s decision on purchasing a vehicle. How to design the characteristics of the suspension system which are directly related to ride comfort and handling performances, is always very crucial in developing the chassis system of a vehicle. During the product development cycle, the suspension system parameters’ values are optimized through a number of iterations using design-simulation tools such as ADAMS, TruckSim, etc., before the actual prototype is developed. The simulation time taken for one iteration in these design-simulation tools is very high. Also, very high expertise of manpower and high computing machines are required for performing ride and handling simulations. This leads to increased product development cost and lead time. In the current market scenario, quick time launch with reduced cost is essential to gain market share and profitability. In this paper, an analytical model was developed for studies on combined vertical and lateral dynamics with 11 degrees of freedom (DOFs) and simulations were done for different load cases. The simulation parameters’ results correlated with ADAMS/Car simulation results and the deviations are discussed in this paper. The proposed method using an analytical model takes very little time for running a single iteration and hence can be used for design optimization based on design of experiments that leads to a drastic reduction in product development cycle cost and lead time.