Safety and Lateral Dynamics Improvement of a Race Car Using Active Rear Wing Control 2019-01-0643

As the forward speed of a race car increases, the safety of the vehicle and the driver becomes of a significant concern. Active aerodynamic control can effectively enhance the lateral stability of race cars over tight cornering maneuvers. A split rear wing has been proposed in this regard. By means of manipulating the attack angles for the right and left parts of the split rear wing, a favorable yaw moment may be achieved to ensure the lateral stability of the vehicle. However, active control of the split rear wing has not been adequately explored. This paper proposes a novel active split rear wing, which can improve the lateral stability over tight cornering maneuvers, and will not degrade the longitudinal dynamics of the vehicle. A LQR-based controller for the active split rear wing is designed using a linear vehicle model. In order to examine the performance of the active split rear wing, co-simulation is carried out by combining the LQR-based controller designed in Matlab and a high fidelity vehicle model generated in CarSim. The effectiveness of the proposed active split rear wing is demonstrated by the results derived from the co-simulation.