Suspension and chassis parameters impact on vehicle handling and road holding

Abstract

When developing suspension subsystems for a vehicle, it is necessary to be able to prepare the design for proper vehicle directional control and handling. A slight understeer behaviour is targeted at different driving conditions for a passenger vehicle and several suspension factors impact this behaviour of the vehicle. This thesis aims at understanding the effect of various suspension and chassis parameters on vehicle handling and development of a tool that predicts the vehicle steady state handling behaviour for a user defined suspension setup. The tool is developed based on the slip angle definition of understeer and a handling diagram is generated as a result. The slip angles for the tires are determined by solving a set of non linear equations that describe the equations of motion. The tool is validated with experimental data from two different sources. The results of the tool match with the experimental data which validates the method and the tool developed. The user interface for the tool is made simple to use. Various configurations for the suspension setup can be fed to the tool as an excel sheet and the results can be obtained by running a MATLAB code in the background.