Optimization Of Front Suspension Based On Response Surface Methodology And Analysis Of Vehicle Handling And Stability

In recent years, the development of national economic is rapid and sustained, the totalamount freightage of the whole society increases constantly,this promote the continuousprogress of highway network construction. Because of the advantages of large carryingcapacity, high transport efficiency, semi-trailer plays an important role in the field ofChina road transport. Semi-trailer has characteristics of high centroid, large load, and there isa complex coupling relationship between traction and towed part,owing to this, cab jitter,tailflick, sideslip and trailer response delay risk are easy to occur. Therefore, it is necessaryto research and explore the handling stability.This subject comes from a semi-trailer towing vehicle development project of a heavytruck enterprises. As it will spent a lot of manpower and material resources toverifyorimprove the initial design scheme by equipment a real vehicle, and make the development ofnew models for a longer period of time. Therefore, this paper establishedthe simulation model in the virtual prototype software, then predicted the performance of theinitial design scheme andoptimized the unreasonable parameters.As the important assembly of semi-trailer towing vehicle, whether the spring frontsuspension can make ideal changes to the external environment is closely related to thevehicle handling and stability. In this paper,a leaf spring suspension modeled is built inADAMS/Car and its kinematics characteristic is tested,by analyzing the test results we canfound that the magnitude and variation of the kingpin inclination did not meet the designrequirements, therefore method of sensitivity analysis and parameter optimization which werebased on the response surface were carried out.In order to estimate handling stability performance of the vehicle, called the optimizedsuspension and conjunction it with the other assembly models, finally a multi body simulationmodel of the semi-trailer towing vehicle we studied is built. Then four kinds of workingconditions are selected to test analysis and evaluation the handling and stability performanceof the vehicle. As the structure of semi-trailer towing vehicle is special, after the test,the parameters of the tractor and trailer are compared and analyzed. The results show thatthe vehicle handling and stability all meet the design requirements,towing vehicle and trailer have a good correspondence, the design scheme is verified.Due to the use of the parametric modeling method,it is convenient for product secondarydevelopment and theory research, so finally did a research to find out the influence ofmatching parameters between trailer and tractor on vehicle handling stability,the workalso plays a role in validate the existing matching scheme.