Abstract
Vehicle safety and the overall enjoyment of the driving experience plays an important role regarding the handling characteristics of a commercial vehicle. Presently applied evaluation procedures are based on international standards (1), (2), which are usually legitimated on large proving grounds and their application is quite time consuming. Newer approaches focus on the on-board identification of vehicle parameters. This procedure differs substantially from currently used methods. New evaluation methods and criteria are developed especially for heavy commercial vehicles.
The present paper describes methods how to simplify and speed up the currently used complex objective vehicle dynamics evaluation process. Therefore the focus is on the application of new procedures to evaluate the vehicle dynamics of heavy commercial vehicles, which are already successfully applied to measurement data of passenger cars (3), (4). These methods enable the use of simple test manoeuvres instead of the commonly used complex and time consuming driving procedures, which require steering machines and large dynamic platforms. The achieved results are vehicle parameters, e.g. damping and natural frequency of the vehicles roll angle from any driving manoeuvres within the linear range of vehicle dynamics. Thus, with simply and freely driven manoeuvres (e.g. double lane change), a sufficiently high accuracy and reproducibility can be achieved.
The application of a second method enables the identification of side force characteristics from vehicle measurement data. A comparison between the identified characteristics and the tyre model TMeasy (5) shows feasible results.
KEYWORDS: Commercial Vehicles, Tyre Characteristics; Parameter Identification; Vehicle Dynamics, Handling