Abstract
Comfort, road holding and safety of passenger cars are mainly influenced by an appropriate design of suspension systems. Improvements of the dynamic behaviour can be achieved by implementing semi-active or active suspension systems. In these cases, the correct design of a well-performing suspension control strategy is of fundamental importance to obtain satisfying results. Operational Modal Analysis allows the experimental structural identification in those that are the real operating conditions: Moving from output-only data, leading to modal models linearised around the more interesting working points and, in the case of controlled systems, providing the needed information for the optimal design and verification of the controller performance. All these characters are needed for the experimental assessment of vehicle suspension systems. In the paper two suspension architectures are considered equipping the same car type. The former is a semi-active commercial system, the latter a novel prototypic active system. For the assessment of suspension performance, two different kinds of tests have been considered, proving ground tests on different road profiles and laboratory four poster rig tests. By OMA-processing the signals acquired in the different testing conditions and by comparing the results, it is shown how this tool can be effectively utilised to verify the operation and the performance of those systems, by only carrying out a simple, cost-effective road test.
Highlights
Vehicle comfort, road holding and safety are strongly related to an appropriate design of suspensions
In this case, a still satisfying agreement has been obtained between four poster and proving ground tests and, for this reason, only the results of the latter test typology are reported
Operational Modal Analysis is proposed as a tool for the performance assessment of suspension systems for passenger cars
Summary
Road holding and safety are strongly related to an appropriate design of suspensions. Two Ford S-MAX, two instances of the same type of vehicle, equipped with two different suspension architectures have been tested The former is a commercial vehicle equipped with a sky-hook semi-active suspension system having three different parameter settings that the driver is able to select, modifying the amount of damping in the system: A normal one which is useful in the most common situations and two other ones corresponding the first to a more comfortable behaviour and the second to a stiffer one. By OMA-processing the acquired signals in the different testing conditions and by comparing the obtained results, it is shown in what follows how this tool can be effectively utilised to verify the operation and the performance of the two considered suspension systems. OMA, becomes a useful designing tool in this field, since it can be used to check the actual behaviour of a prototype at an intermediate or final stage of its optimisation process generally referred to as tuning of the suspensions
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