Simulation, Optimization And Integrated Design Of Vehicle Suspension And Steering System

This paper based on the major scientific and technological project "Multi-car shared platform digital developed technology and its application",from Zhejiang Science and Technology Department (2008C01002).Vehicle suspension and steering system is an important part of the chassis platform, its motion characteristics are directly related to vehicle handling and stability, comfort, steering portability, tire life and so on. A well-designed suspension and steering mechanism needs to make accurate judgment about the motion characteristics, and then choose the right system parameters.Firstly, based on dynamics theory and finite element analysis theory, a rigid-flexible coupling multi-body suspension and steering system was established, combining with ADAMS and ANSYS software.And then Parallel Wheel Travel Analysis and Steering Analysis were carried out. Thereby, the relationship between toe angle, camber angle, kingpin inclination angle,caster angle and wheelbase and the wheel travell were presented, and also the relationship of ackerman error and the steering angle.Secondly, the experimental design (DOE) analyses by using the ADAMS/Insight module were taken to do the optimization. The first test was used to determine the factors which impact the system mostly; the second test used Response Surface Method to do the regression analysis and got the best solution which enabled performance of the system improved significantly. In view of the great fluctuation on objective functions which causes constraints dissatisfied, robust design was applied to the vehicle divided steering linkage optimization problem. A robust model was established by considering the kinematic pair clearance and structural error both in the objective functions and constrains.The example showed that this method is practical and effective.At last, an efficient and convenient integrated design method was proposed based on the characters of vehicle suspension and steering system. An integrated design platform of vehicle suspension and steering system, based on the secondary development of Oracle, ADAMS/Car and ANSYS,was constructed using VC++.The platform was proved to be practical and adaptive to a variety of types of design and analysis of suspension and steering system.