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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.

Active steering systems can help the driver to master critical driving situations. This paper presents a fuzzy logic control strategy on active steering vehicle based on a multi-body vehicle dynamic model. The multi-body vehicle dynamic model using ADAMS can accurately predict the dynamic performance of the vehicle. A new hybrid steering scheme including both active front steering (applying an additional front steering angle besides the driver input) and rear steering is presented to control both yaw velocity and sideslip angle. A set of fuzzy logic rules is designed for the active steering controller, and the fuzzy controller can adjust both sideslip angle and yaw velocity through the co-simulation between ADAMS and the Matlab fuzzy control unit with the optimized membership function. To ensure the design of high-quality fuzzy control rules, a rule optimization strategy is introduced.

To solve the dynamic response problem that contains uncertain parameters needs, the stochastic differential equations needs to be calculated. Interval analysis has been widely used to solve engineering problems which contain many uncertain parameters usually. But the numerical solution method for stochastic differential equations based on the interval analysis method was seldom investigated. In this study a new numerical interval method for the stochastic differential equations based on the Euler's method is presented, which can be used to solve the linear system effectively and efficiently. The probabilistic and interval dynamics analysis of a two-degree-of-freedom bike car model with uncertain parameters are presented.

Vehicle tire performance is an important consideration for vehicle handling, stability, mobility, and ride comfort as well as durability. Significant efforts have been dedicated to tire modeling in the past, but there is still room to improve its accuracy. In this study, a detailed in-plane flexible ring tire model is proposed, where the tire belt is discretized, and each discrete belt segment is considered as a rigid body attached to a number of parallel tread blocks. The mass of each belt segment is accumulated at its geometric center. To test the proposed in-plane tire model, a full-vehicle model is integrated with the tire model for simulation under a special driving scenario: acceleration from rest for a few seconds, then deceleration for a few seconds on a flat-level road, and finally constant velocity on a rough road. The simulation results indicate that the tire model is able to generate tire/road contact patch forces that yield reasonable vehicle dynamic responses.

A new recursive method is presented for real-time estimating the inertia parameters of a vehicle using the well-known Two-Degree-of- Freedom (2DOF) bicycle car model. The parameter estimation is built on the framework of polynomial chaos theory and maximum likelihood estimation. Then the most likely value of both the mass and yaw mass moment of inertia can be obtained based on the numerical simulations of yaw velocity by Newton method. To improve the estimation accuracy, the Newton method is modified by employing the acceptance probability to escape from the local minima during the estimation process. The results of the simulation study suggest that the proposed method can provide quick convergence speed and accurate outputs together with less sensitivity to tuning the initial values of the unidentified parameters.

Practical vehicle contains many uncertainties which may result from poorly known or variable parameters or from uncertain inputs. These uncertainties can be presented by fuzzy parameters, random parameters or interval parameters. A new uncertain analysis method is applied to the case in which the vehicle system contains both random parameters and interval parameters. This new uncertain method is a systematic integration of the Polynomial Chaos (PC) theory which accounts for random uncertainty and Chebyshev inclusion function theory which accounts for interval uncertainty. A multi-body vehicle model with both random parameters and interval parameters is used as a numerical model and vehicle handling is investigated in details. The Monte Carlo method combined with the scanning method is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for vehicle handling.