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Elastomeric bushings are widely used in the passenger cars to make the cars have an ideal vehicle Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) performance. However, elastomeric bushings also influence on the vehicle handling, ride and the durability performance of each component in the vehicle suspension system. It is relatively easy and cost effective to change the compliance of the bushing components compared with other method because they are made of elastomeric materials. The design of an elastomeric bushing is really a big challenge. One of the main difficulties comes from the different target compliance is wanted according to the handling, ride and durability demand at each different orientation (indicated by X Y Z) of the bushing. In this paper the following procedure was used for optimization of suspension elastomeric bushing compliance. Firstly, a detailed multi-body model was built including the nonlinear bushing effects and lower control arm flexibility.

This paper investigates a hierarchical optimization procedure for the optimum synthesis of a double-axle steering mechanism by considering the dynamic load of a vehicle which is seldom discussed in the previous literature. Firstly, a multi-body model of double-axle steering is presented by characterizing the detailed leaf spring effect. Accordingly, the influences of dynamic load including the motion interference of steering linkage resulted from the elastic deformation of leaf spring, and the effects of wheel slip angle and the position discrepancy of wheel speed rotation centers are explored systematically. And then, a hierarchical optimization method based on target cascading methodology is proposed to classify the design variables of double-axle steering mechanism into four levels. At last, a double-axle steering mechanism of a heavy-duty truck is utilized to demonstrate the validity of this method.

A Special Analytical Target Cascading (SATC) process is developed for design problem which is difficult to ascertain the targets cascaded from upper level to lower level. The methodology is applied to achieve improving Handling Performance and Ride Quality (HPRQ) of a passenger car. A bi-level hierarchical structure with target-transforming process is established based on conceptual suspension model and multi-body models. DOE, RSM and a combined optimization method of simulated annealing and Programming Quadratic Line search is applied to execute the optimization process. The result shows that HPRQ is improved through special ATC based on CSM and multi-body modeling technique.