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The good mobility and large carrying capacity promote the popularity of intercity coach in mass transit, especially in the long distance passenger transport nowadays. However, accidents related to coach and bus usually involve large casualties. Higher risk of fatalities is exhibited in rollover than the other coach accident types. In order to protect the occupants when a rollover accident occurs, coach structure must have sufficient strength to resist the impact loads. This paper presents a rollover test of an intercity coach body section using both numerical simulation and experimental testing to investigate its rollover crashworthiness in accordance with ECE R66. A full scale coach body section is manufactured and a tilting bench is designed and fabricated. Displacement transducers and accelerometer are equipped to record the time history of superstructure deformation and impact acceleration. And the FE model was developed accordingly.

An experiment is carried out to measure creep groan of a drum brake located in a trailer axle of a truck. The noise nearby the drum brake and accelerations on brake shoes, axle and trailer frame are collected to analyze the occurring conditions and characteristics of the creep groan. A multi-body dynamics model with 1/4 trailer chassis structures is established for analyzing brake component vibrations that generates the creep groan. In the model, the contact force between brake cam and brake shoes, the contact friction characteristics between brake linings and inner circular surface of brake drum, and the properties of chassis structure are included. Dynamic responses of brake shoes, axle and trailer frame during the braking process are estimated using the established model and the responses are compared with the measured results, which validate the model.

In order to improve the ride comfort and road friendliness of heavy commercial vehicles, a lateral interconnected air suspension system is developed. Based on the theory of thermodynamics and vehicle dynamics, a Ten-degree-of-freedom vehicle dynamics model with lateral interconnected air suspension is established. Interconnected pipeline parameters’ influence on characteristics of air suspension system in whole vehicle are calculated and analyzed. Simulation results show that the stiffness of air suspension decreases gradually with the increase of interconnected pipeline diameter. The designed interconnected air spring experiments verify the simulation results. Simulation on vehicle dynamics models is carried out by building random road models with different roughness levels in MATLAB.

Roll stability is an important attribute which must be accounted for in heavy trucks. In order to analyze the anti-roll performance of the suspension in the early period of development, engineers will generally use Multi Body Dynamics (MBD) simulation software which can save time in the product development cycle. However, air suspension employs levelling valves to adjust the height by charging and discharging air springs. The air spring is typically modeled as a closed container in the simulation; the stiffness change of the air spring caused by the levelling valve is not considered. In this paper, an air suspension with levelling valves model integrated into the multi-body dynamic model of a 6�4 heavy truck is built with a co-simulation technique to investigate the influence of three types of levelling valves arrangement on the roll performance of the suspension under two typical conditions.

The joint forces and moments applied to the joints in an air suspension system in truck are important input loads for lightweight and fatigue analysis of bushings, air spring brackets, torque arms and trailing arms. In order to derive a reliable solution of joint forces and moments, engineers will generally use Multi Body Dynamics (MBD) simulation software, like ADAMS, which can save time in product development cycle. Taking an air suspension in truck as a study example, a 2-dimensional quasi-static model of an air suspension, whose stiffness of air spring and bushing is nonlinear, is established in ADAMS environment. After that, simulations are performed at the typical and extreme working condition respectively, and the results are compared with another three cases. Case I assumes that the stiffness of air spring is linear but the stiffness of bushings, including torsion and radial stiffness, are nonlinear.