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Accurate ride and handling prediction is an important requirement in today's automobile industry. To achieve the same, it is imperative to have a good estimation of damper model. Conventional methods used for modelling complex vehicle components (like bushings and dampers) are often inadequate to represent behaviour over wide frequency ranges and/or different amplitudes. This is difficult in the part of OEMs to model the physics-based model as the damper’s geometry, material and characteristics property is proprietary to part manufacturer. This is also usually difficult to obtain as a typical data acquisition exercise takes lots of time, cost, and effort. This paper aims to address this problem by predicting the damper force accurately at different velocity/ frequency and amplitude of measured data using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN).

In the automobile industry, the door closing effort spells out the engineering and quality of the vehicle. After the visual impact a vehicle has on the customer, the doors are most likely the very first part of the vehicle he/she encounters, to enter and exit the vehicle. One of the customer’s very first impressions about the quality of the car is given by the behavior of the doors when opening and closing, the swinging velocity and the energy that is required to obtain a full latching that the door makes when closed by the user. Door closing effort gives an indication of how good or bad the vehicle is engineered. The purpose of this paper is to propose modifications in the door system which help in reduction of door closing effort or velocity by two different methods, EZ Slam Door and Bungee Rope. In this paper, parameters like hinge friction, hinge axis inclination, sealing, latch and air bind effect are analyzed which affect door closing effort.

Ride is an important attribute which must be accounted in the passenger segment vehicles. Excessive H point acceleration, Steering wheel acceleration, Pitch acceleration can reduce the comfort of the driver and the passengers during high frequency and low frequency rough road events. Excessive Understeer gradient, roll gradient, roll acceleration and Sprung mass lift could affect the Vehicle driver interaction during Steady state cornering, Braking and Step steer events. The concept architecture of the vehicle plays an important role in how comfort the vehicle will be. This paper discusses how to improve SUV ride performances by keeping handling performance attributes same or better than base vehicle. Multi Objective Optimization was carried out by keeping spring, bushing and damper characteristic as the design variables to avoid new system or component development time and cost.

Lateral Stability is an important attribute which must be accounted for in the pick-up truck segment vehicles. If designed in an improper way, undesirable effects such as oversteer or tail sway may occur. Excessive yaw rate magnitudes, or tail sway, can reduce the confidence of the driver during severe lane change events. The concept architecture of the vehicle plays an important role in how stable the vehicle will be. High yaw rate or tail sway during limit cornering was reported during prototype vehicle evaluations. The tested vehicle configuration incorporated a double wish bone front suspension with an antiroll bar and a rear solid axle suspension with leaf springs and an antiroll bar. The feedback was critically analysed using computer simulations of the condition found in on track testing. Since the vehicle was still with the validation team, quick solution was necessary. This paper discusses the process which resulted in improved vehicle performance.

The main challenge that arises in the design of a motorcycle frame is its effect on the functionality on the vehicle, its effect on ride comfort and its durability. While functionality and ride comfort due to frame can be evaluated by subjectively testing it before the product reaches customer, evaluation of its durability is a complex process. This work is an investigation of the frame body of a 100 cc vehicle in India. These vehicles are subjected to endurance tests on a rough road at vehicle level to quantitatively evaluate their frame durability. However, such tests require significant time and cost, so an attempt has been made to develop a virtual rough road simulator to extract forces involved in it and testing the frame at component level with those loads on a test rig. Also durability results were compared and analyzed with the track data and frame test rig.