Ride Dynamics of Articulated Vehicles-A Literature Survey

This paper presents a review of the available literature describing the methods of modelling the vibrational response of articulated vehicles to the road inputs at the tire contact points. It states and discusses the mathematical techniques that have been put forward for obtaining road input characteristics, for modelling the vehicles in a range of degrees of freedom, and for performing the analysis necessary to obtain the vibrational response. Finally the indices that have been proposed for ride comfort and ride safety are given and the manner in which various researchers relate these to the vibrational characteristics of the vehicles is described.     

A Procedure for Optimization of Truck Suspensions

The purpose of this paper is to develop a procedure based on covariance analysis and nonlinear programming techniques which can be used for the parameter selection of optimum truck suspensions. The procedure is applied to explore the differences in parameter selection caused by the changes in the frequency content of the road input or by changes in the criteria for optimization. The equations of motion for a tractor-semitrailer truck are cast in state space form. The road excitations are represented by the output of a white noise excited shaping filter taking into consideration the time delays between the different vehicle axles. Shape filters to represent human perception of vibration in both the vertical and longitudinal directions in the time domain are presented and realized in terms of state variables. The suspension parameters of the road-vehicle-human body system are optimized using a direct search algorithm.     

Random Response of Tractor-Semitrailer System

This work describes an analytical study of the dynamic behaviour of a tractor-semitrailer vehicle. A digital computer simulation was used to describe the longitudinal, vertical, and pitching motions of the vehicle travelling over a stationary random road surface. A man-seat model was also incorporated into the simulation. Vehicle response to road irregularities has been studied by assuming two different roads for loaded and unloaded cases.

Numerical results are presented for vehicle, showing system eigenvalues, power spectral densities and root mean square values of the linear and angular accelerations and displacements. Vehicle acceleration response is compared with the ISO riding comfort standard. All results for the loaded and unloaded cases and for smooth and rough roads indicated that an uncomfortable ride would result from vehicle response.