Development Of A Light Commercial Vehicle Air Suspension System

With the development of the vehicle technique. The comfort and handling requirement from customer will be much higher. In the light commercial vehicle area, the normal mechanical leaf spring can not meet such requirement. So the air suspension is born and used widely. The elastic components of air suspension is the air-bag spring. The advantage is the non-linear feature and the suspension will not be changed with loads variety. The suspension height will maintain the same within unload and load situation, it can reduce the body height and reduces the vibration to guarantee the vehicle steady driving.The thesis analyzes virtual prototype of the light commercial vehicles assembled air suspension by ADAMS software, it mainly analyzes ride and handling performance of the rear suspension. Then it gains the new method from model building, virtual analysis to optimizing during air suspension design.At first, according to the vehicle design requirements, it builds the related model of air spring by ABAQUS software, analyzes the no-linear feature of stiffness, gains the stiffness effecting factors with static states analysis, gains the response on different frequency with dynamic analysis, analyzes the shock insulation. Based on the ADAMS platform, it builds the vehicle model assembled the combined suspension, makes the virtual analysis of the handling and ride. According to the national standard, it simulates handling and ride on different working conditions and gives the mark. It makes the further analysis for lower marked conditions, finds the effected factors, does the optimizing, gets the optimum one.Second, it does the architectural design for the main components of air suspension, and does the CAE analysis for main loads bearing parts, it can guarantee the parts enough strength, reduced mass, optimum structure, good developing quality.At last, it optimizes the rolling angle stiffness of the rear air suspension to increase the handling score, according to virtual simulation result. During the analysis, it analyzes the cross link proposal and rear stabilized bar proposal and gain the optimum one. According to such optimum proposal, it is assembled and tested on the real vehicles, it compares the data of the handling and ride test, the virtual result is similar to the real test result, so the method and the improved proposal is valid. It can give the reference to air suspension design and optimizing.