DEVELOPMENT OF A RIGID RING QUARTER-VEHICLE MODEL WITH AN ADVANCED ROAD PROFILE ALGORITHM FOR DURABILITY AND RIDE COMFORT PREDICTIONS

摘要

In this paper a new five-degree-of-freedom in-plane Rigid Ring Quarter-Vehicle Model (RRQVM) with a Force Dependent Effective Road Profile (FDERP) is derived and programmed in MATLAB/Simulink©. This novel fully integrated model uses the tire-road vertical contact force to update the effective road height and slope at each integration time step. The model is capable of simulating the response of a free rolling tire over arbitrarily uneven road surfaces to study vehicle ride comfort and durability with efficient, accurate results. The RRQVM is validated with tire spindle vertical acceleration data from virtual Finite Element Analysis (FEA) Quarter-Vehicle Model (QVM) tests.rnA baseline in-plane RRQVM with a Force Independent Effective Road Profile (FIERP) is also developed for comparison with the FDERP RRQVM. Results show that the FDERP RRQVM predicts the vertical tire spindle acceleration more accurately than the FIERP RRQVM when compared to the FEA RRQVM results, especially at speeds above 11 km/hr. Therefore, the advanced FDERP model provides the RRQVM with a more accurate effective road profile than a conventional FIERP model.