Research of the Correlation of Vehicle Handling Subjective Evaluation and KC Characteristics

摘要

Research Objective Vehicle ride and handling, which is important to the overall vehicle safety, is one of the performances that the customers are most concerned about. Therefore, the vehicle handling development, highly relied on subjective evaluation, is indispensable during the vehicle development process. Suspension K&C (Kinematics and Compliance) characteristics, which have direct influence on vehicle handling performance, are the key technique targets during vehicle design and validation processes. However, due to the lack of reliable link between subjective assessments and K&C objective measurements, lots of chassis tuning work still need to be done in order to accomplish the vehicle handling development targets, even though advanced design and CAE tools have already widely used in chassis design. In this paper, a methodology of analyzing the correlation between subjective evaluation and K&C measurements is further studied in order to reduce the developing time and cost. Methodology In this paper, six popular cars in Chinese market were chosen for subjective assessments by expert six drivers and K&C objective tests by test rig. In the subjective assessment, some parameters of the vehicle were evaluated. On the K&C test rig, the vehicles were measured in different load cases such as vertical test, roll test, side force test, brake force test, etc. And then a statistical methodology of multiple regressions was applied to analyze the correlation between K&C measurement results and subjective assessments. According to the multiple regression analysis, the correlations of K&C characteristics and subjective evaluation can be defined by coefficient, and the regression equation can be used to predict the subjective evaluation results of the vehicle. Results With this methodology, vehicle handling performance is more predictable and the relationships between subjective handling and K&C characteristics are more reliable. Limitations of this study The mainly limitation of this study is the accuracy of the regression equation. In order to increase the credit of regression equation, more vehicle samples need to be test in the future work. What does the paper offer that is new in the field: Although a lot of studies have already done in K&C and vehicle handling performance field, the link between K&C and vehicle handling subjective feelings is still lack of reliability. In this paper, using multiple regression to study the correlation between subjective evaluation of vehicle handling and K&C objective measurement is a new methodology in this field. Conclusion This research can reduce the chassis tuning work cycles during vehicle handling development and will also benefit the cost and time savings.