Abstract
Keywords: Vehicle Dynamics, Handling, Commercial Vehicles, Tyre Characteristics, Parameter Identification
The handling characteristics of a vehicle play an important role regarding vehicle safety and the overall enjoyment of the driving experience. Presently applied 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 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 and calculated step, frequency and phase responses 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.