Abstract
Many investigators have shown the influence of body flexibility on handling characteristics. In these papers, the influence was mainly explained by the subjective evaluation method. In this paper, we show the shapes of the vehicle body distortion during steady state cornering and the quantitative influence of body flexibility on the handling characteristics.
The proposed method using only finite element analysis could achieve the improvement on the body performance and the deterioration in handling characteristics effectively, which is difficult to be accomplished by the multi-body analysis approach with a flexible body.
Finally, the verification test results suggest that the reinforcement reducing the body distortion we have focused on could improve handling characteristics.