Extraction Method for Design Principle of Static Behavior of Vehicle Suspension System

Abstract

In recent years, the demand for making a car comfortable is increasing and as a factor which governs the comfort of a car, improvement in the driving-stability is attempted. Although body rigidity, tire characteristic, aerodynamics, etc. are raised as factors affecting the design results, it is known experientially that the influence of a suspension is especially great. Therefore, the design of a suspension system becomes important for making a comfortable car. Generally, the design processes of a complicated system can be finished through three major stages, the concept design, the basic design, and the detailed design. For example, at the stage of detailed design, the design engineers have the CAD data for the manufacture, and at the same time they can develop very accurate computer simulation model from the CAD data to help them to make decision for special design factors. The basic concept of every CAE tool is to generate the analytical model by a series of discrete elements set instead of the physical parts. As a result, it becomes very difficult for the engineers to find the physical mechanism of the complicated behavior of their design from the results of numerical analysis. For the concept design processes, it is very important for the design engineers to understand the basic principle of their basic design plans and to compare with the different concepts to know which one has the highest potential to achieve the design aims. However the engineers have to accomplish these processes by only their experience. In this study, the authors proposed a new method to identify the important information which links to the basic principle of the physical behavior by using CAE technology. This method can help the engineers to grasp the basic physical characteristic that governs the first-order behavior.