Abstract
Vehicle comfort and driving safety are mostly influenced by vertical accelerations and vehicle movements caused by pitch and roll motions. In the paper "Vehicle Dynamics with Adaptive or Semi-Active Suspension Systems - Demands on Software and Hardware" Wallentowitz and Redlich have shown at AVEC'94 [4] in which way tyre stiffness, shock absorber characteristics, spring stiffness and unsprung mass have an influence on vehicle comfort and active safety. They achieved these results by the theoretical analysis of a quarter-vehicle-model. Their examinations are extended in this paper on the model of a complete delivery truck. By the use of the multibody-simulation tool SIMPACK the road performance of a delivery truck will be analysed. Therefore a complex model of the vehicle has been built up in SIMPACK. Several computer simulations have been carried out to analyse the vehicle comfort and handling characteristics in different standard driving manoeuvres. Furthermore, the potential of improvements is shown by simulating different driving manoeuvres with the complete vehicle model by varying some vehicle characteristics such as tyre stiffness, shock absorber characteristics, spring stiffness and unsprung mass. In addition to that, simulations with models of unconventional spring- and damper-systems have been carried out to demonstrate the potential of improvements by the use of these systems. Two different controller algorithms for a semiactive and an active suspension system have been used and will be compared in this paper.