Abstract
This paper reported on an investigation to determine the spring and damper settings that ensured optimal ride comfort of vehicle in different speeds using design of experiment method (DOE). The extent to which the ride comfort optimal suspension settings vary for roads of different roughness and varying speeds and the levels of ride comfort that can be achieved, were addressed. Optimization was performed with the DOE method on a 7 DOF modeled in MATLAB software for speeds ranging from 60 to 90 km/h. Results indicated that optimization of suspension settings using the road and specified range of speed also improved the ride comfort on the same road at the different speeds. These settings also improved ride comfort for other roads at the optimization speed and other speeds, although not as much as when optimization has been done for the particular road. For improved ride comfort, damping generally has to be lower than the standard (compromised) setting, the rear spring as soft as possible and the front spring ranging from as soft as possible to stiffer depending on road and speed conditions. Ride comfort was most sensitive to a change in rear spring stiffness. Key words: Ride comfort, optimization, design of experiment (DOE), suspension, road condition, spring and damper.
Highlights
Ride comfort is one of the most critical factors to evaluate the automobile performance and has been an interesting topic for researchers for many years
One of the complete works in this area is the simulation done by Gobbi et al (2001) at Fiat Company. They used a car model that was developed in ADAMS using real road inputs, and constructed an optimization scheme that was successfully implemented to their car
In the above equations, i are the change of springs length equal to suspension system, which are used for forces, Fic and Fis in Equations (1) to (7)
Summary
Ride comfort is one of the most critical factors to evaluate the automobile performance and has been an interesting topic for researchers for many years. That is, computer simulation and road experiment, are used to investigate ride comfort. One of the complete works in this area is the simulation done by Gobbi et al (2001) at Fiat Company They used a car model that was developed in ADAMS using real road inputs, and constructed an optimization scheme that was successfully implemented to their car. Showed that incorporation of a time delay between the front and rear axles in controller design improve the dynamic behavior when road excitation is simulated by white noise and vehicle velocity is constant. It is assumed that the modeled nonlinear damper and spring of suspension have the curves as shown in Figure 5 and 6.
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