Handling Analysis of a Vehicle Fitted with Roll-Plane Hydraulically Interconnected Suspension Using Motion-Mode Energy Method 2014-01-0110

This paper employs the motion-mode energy method (MEM) to investigate the effects of a roll-plane hydraulically interconnected suspension (HIS) system on vehicle body-wheel motion-mode energy distribution. A roll-plane HIS system can directly provide stiffness and damping to vehicle roll motion-mode, in addition to spring and shock absorbers in each wheel station. A four degree-of-freedom (DOF) roll-plane half-car model is employed for this study, which contains four body-wheel motion-modes, including body bounce mode, body roll mode, wheel bounce mode and wheel roll mode. For a half-car model, its dynamic energy contained in the relative motions between its body and wheels is a sum of the energy of these four motion-modes. Numerical examples and full-car experiments are used to illustrate the concept of the effects of HIS on motion-mode energy distribution. The obtained simulation results show that the installed HIS system is able to reduce the energy level in the body-dominated roll motion-mode, and it has negligible effect in the bounce mode. Experimental results match the simulation results well.