Modal and frequency response characteristics of vehicle suspension system using full car model

Abstract

This paper involves simulated studies of a vehicle suspension system for modal and frequency response characteristics. Ride comfort and car handling are two important considerations for finalizing the design of the vehicle suspension. However, both of these are conflicting to each other. Ride comfort and car handling depend on dynamic characteristics of the vehicle (i.e. natural frequencies, mode shapes, frequency response functions etc.) too among other parameters. Hence it is very important to carry out modal examination of the vehicle suspension system to find out the natural characteristics of the system. The same has been attempted in this work using full car model having seven degree of freedoms. The degrees of freedom include pitching, bouncing and rolling motion along with motion of the un-sprung masses. The software tools namely ANSYS Workbench, MATLAB, and SIMULINK environment has been employed to discover the system’s modal and frequency response features. The vehicle’s natural frequencies and mode shapes were evaluated and bode plots are drawn to explore the system’s frequency response features. The results produced in different software tools have also been compared and discovered to be in close agreement with the results present in the literature.