Generalised multi-axle vehicle handling

The familiar two-axle bicycle model and associated basic concepts of vehicle handling are reviewed and used to introduce minor changes in convention from the literature. The two-axle model is extended to a three-axle vehicle to illustrate the effectiveness of the notation combined with a simplifying mathematical identity found in the two-axle vehicle literature. A generalised model is then developed that produces dynamic equations of motion by inspection for a vehicle with an arbitrary number of steerable and non-steerable axles. Furthermore, the vehicle dynamic concepts of understeer and wheelbase are generalised and can be directly computed for various arbitrary vehicle configurations.     

A substitute model of two-dimensional dry friction exposed to dither generated by rolling contact of wheel and rail

Dither generated by rolling contact of wheel and rail smoothes dry friction damping provided by the primary suspension dampers of freight wagons and it should be taken into account in numerical simulations. But numerically the problem is non-smooth and this leads to long execution time during simulation, especially when the vehicle with friction dampers is modelled in the environment of an multi-body system simulation program, whose solver has to cope with many strong non-linearities. The other difficulty is the necessity of handling within the code a number of big volume files of recorded dither sampled with high frequency. To avoid these difficulties, a substitute model of two-dimensional dry friction exposed to dither is proposed that does not need application of dither during simulation, but it behaves as if dither were applied. Due to this property of the model, the excitation of the vehicle model by track irregularities may be supplied as low-frequency input, which allows fast execution and, the necessity of handling high-volume files of recorded dither is avoided. The substitute model is numerically effective. To identify parameters of the substitute model, a pre-processing employing a sample of the realistic dither is carried-out on a simple two-degrees-of-freedom system. The substitute model is anisotropic, describing anisotropic properties of the two-dimensional friction arising in the presence of one-dimensional dither. The model may be applied in other branches of engineering, for example, in mechatronics and robotics, where application of dither may improve the accuracy of positioning devices.     

Assessment of the influence of the elastic properties of rail vehicle suspensions on safety,ride quality and track fatigue

A sensitivity analysis has been performed to assess the influence of the elastic properties of railway vehicle suspensions on the vehicle dynamic behaviour. To do this, 144 dynamic simulations were performed modifying, one at a time, the stiffness and damping coefficients, of the primary and secondary suspensions. Three values were assigned to each parameter, corresponding to the percentiles 10, 50 and 90 of a data set stored in a database of railway vehicles. After processing the results of these simulations, the analysed parameters were sorted by increasing influence. It was also found which of these parameters could be estimated with a lesser degree of accuracy in future simulations without appreciably affecting the simulation results. In general terms, it was concluded that the highest influences were found for the longitudinal stiffness and the lateral stiffness of the primary suspension, and the lowest influences for the vertical stiffness and the vertical damping of the primary suspension, with the parameters of the secondary suspension showing intermediate influences between them.     

Optimisation of lateral car dynamics taking into account parameter uncertainties

Simulation studies on an active all-wheel-steering car show that disturbance of vehicle parameters have high influence on lateral car dynamics. This motivates the need of robust design against such parameter uncertainties. A specific parametrisation is established combining deterministic, velocity-dependent steering control parameters with partly uncertain, velocity-independent vehicle parameters for simultaneous use in a numerical optimisation process. Model-based objectives are formulated and summarised in a multi-objective optimisation problem where especially the lateral steady-state behaviour is improved by an adaption strategy based on measurable uncertainties. The normally distributed uncertainties are generated by optimal Latin hypercube sampling and a response surface based strategy helps to cut down time consuming model evaluations which offers the possibility to use a genetic optimisation algorithm. Optimisation results are discussed in different criterion spaces and the achieved improvements confirm the validity of the proposed procedure.     

Design of safety-oriented control allocation strategies for overactuated electric vehicles

The new vehicle platforms for electric vehicles (EVs) that are becoming available are characterised by actuator redundancy, which makes it possible to jointly optimise different aspects of the vehicle motion. To do this, high-level control objectives are first specified and solved with appropriate control strategies. Then, the resulting virtual control action must be translated into actual actuator commands by a control allocation layer that takes care of computing the forces to be applied at the wheels. This step, in general, is quite demanding as far as computational complexity is considered. In this work, a safety-oriented approach to this problem is proposed. Specifically, a four-wheel steer EV with four in-wheel motors is considered, and the high-level motion controller is designed within a sliding mode framework with conditional integrators. For distributing the forces among the tyres, two control allocation approaches are investigated. The first, based on the extension of the cascading generalised inverse method, is computationally efficient but shows some limitations in dealing with unfeasible force values. To solve the problem, a second allocation algorithm is proposed, which relies on the linearisation of the tyre–road friction constraints. Extensive tests, carried out in the CarSim simulation environment, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Improvement of vehicle–turnout interaction by optimising the shape of crossing nose

Proper rail geometry in the crossing part is essential for reducing damage on the nose rail. To improve the dynamic behaviour of turnout crossings, a numerical optimisation approach to minimise rolling contact fatigue (RCF) damage and wear in the crossing panel by varying the nose rail shape is presented in the paper. The rail geometry is parameterised by defining several control cross-sections along the crossing. The dynamic vehicle–turnout interaction as a function of crossing geometry is analysed using the VI-Rail package. In formulation of the optimisation problem a combined weighted objective function is used consisting of the normal contact pressure and the energy dissipation along the crossing responsible for RCF and wear, respectively. The multi-objective optimisation problem is solved by adapting the multipoint approximation method and a number of compromised solutions have been found for various sets of weight coefficients. Dynamic behaviour of the crossing has been significantly improved after optimisations. Comparing with the reference design, the heights of the nose rail are notably increased in the beginning of the crossing; the nominal thicknesses of the nose rail are also changed. All the optimum designs work well under different track conditions.     

Design of a feedback-feedforward steering controller for accurate path tracking and stability at the limits of handling

This paper presents a feedback-feedforward steering controller that simultaneously maintains vehicle stability at the limits of handling while minimising lateral path tracking deviation. The design begins by considering the performance of a baseline controller with a lookahead feedback scheme and a feedforward algorithm based on a nonlinear vehicle handling diagram. While this initial design exhibits desirable stability properties at the limits of handling, the steady-state path deviation increases significantly at highway speeds. Results from both linear and nonlinear analyses indicate that lateral path tracking deviations are minimised when vehicle sideslip is held tangent to the desired path at all times. Analytical results show that directly incorporating this sideslip tangency condition into the steering feedback dramatically improves lateral path tracking, but at the expense of poor closed-loop stability margins. However, incorporating the desired sideslip behaviour into the feedforward loop creates a robust steering controller capable of accurate path tracking and oversteer correction at the physical limits of tyre friction. Experimental data collected from an Audi TTS test vehicle driving at the handling limits on a full length race circuit demonstrates the improved performance of the final controller design.     

汽车非线性悬架的混沌研究

采用基于实测数据建立的非线性悬架模型,分析了汽车悬架中的非线性弹簧力和阻尼力,对非线性悬架系统的混沌运动进行了研究.在单频正弦路面、拟周期路面以及随机路面激励情况下,仿真计算得到了系统的响应.分析各激励下系统的相轨迹、庞加莱(Poincaré)截面、时间历程曲线、功率谱图及李亚谱诺夫(Lyapunov)指数图,结果表明非线性悬架系统中存在混沌现象.     

基于交通效率、安全和特定交通组成的纵坡合理坡长

由于用地及地形、地质等限制,纵坡常被迫用到规范推荐的限制值,而我国《城市道路设计规范》(CJJ37-90)对5%以下的纵坡坡长限制没有进行规定,如何确定此类纵坡的合理坡长直接影响到路段交通安全、效率、工程经济等。通过对已有的纵坡坡长限制研究成果整理分析,提出运用汽车动力学进行坡长计算时,应该考虑汽车坡中换档的情况,并引入适合车型的概念,建议根据道路交通组成的实际情况确定坡长。分析坡长对驾驶员心率增长率、制动鼓温度、事故率的影响,分别确定各影响因素下的最大坡长。最后提出综合考虑交通效率和安全的坡长限制确定方法,并在某大纵坡路段的纵坡论证中进行了应用。     

悬索管道桥结构参数对全桥动力特性的影响研究

大跨度悬索管道桥桥面窄,宽跨比小,结构十分轻柔,结构参数的改变对其动力特性有较大的影响。以川气东送野山河悬索跨越工程为例,采用大型有限元分析软件ANSYS10.0分析了风缆预张力和风缆面与水平面夹角变化对该悬索管道桥动力特性的影响。研究表明,提高风缆预张力和选取适当的风缆与水平面的夹角能有效地提高全桥结构刚度。