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To solve the problem of serious roller wear and improve the smoothness of the sliding door motion process, the rigid-flexible coupling multi-body model of the vehicle sliding door was built in ADAMS. Force boundary conditions of the model were determined to meet the speed requirement of monitoring point and time requirement of door opening-closing process according to the bench test specification. The results of dynamic simulation agreed well with that of test so the practicability and credibility of the model was verified. In the optimization of the ride comfort of the sliding door, two different schemes were proposed. The one was to optimize the position of hinge pivots and the other was to optimize the structural parameters of the middle guide. The impact load of lead roller on middle guide, the curvature of the motion trajectory and angular acceleration of the sliding door centroid were taken as optimization objectives.

Tire forces and moments play an important role in vehicle dynamics and safety. X-by-wire chassis components including active suspension, electronic powered steering, by-wire braking, etc can take the tire forces as inputs to improve vehicle’s dynamic performance. In order to measure the accurate dynamic wheel load, most of the researches focused on the kinematic parameters such as body longitudinal and lateral acceleration, load transfer and etc. In this paper, the authors focus on the suspension system, avoiding the dependence on accurate mass and aerodynamics model of the whole vehicle. The geometry of the suspension is equated by the spatial parallel mechanism model (RSSR model), which improves the calculation speed while ensuring the accuracy. A suspension force observer is created, which contains parameters including spring damper compression length, push rod force, knuckle accelerations, etc., combing the kinematic and dynamic characteristic of the vehicle.

With the growing prosperity of the long-distance freight and urban logistics industry, the demand for cargo trucks is gradually increasing. The connecting bracket is the critical connecting part of the truck chassis, which bears the load transmitted by the road excitation and reduces the damage to the frame caused by the load. However, the occurrence of rough road conditions is inevitable in heavy-duty transportation. In this paper, road durability tests and fatigue life analysis are carried out on the original structure to ensure the safety of the vehicle. Based on the known boundary and load constraints, a lightweight and high-performance structure is obtained through size optimization, as the original structure cannot meet the performance requirements. Firstly, the road test was conducted on the truck where the original bracket structure is located.

The transient impact load generated by door closing is used as the input of the closing condition, which is an important part of door system investigation. In this article, the basic theory of transfer path analysis (TPA) is introduced to handle the abnormal vibration of the front-left door with the glass down stall position of a certain vehicle during the closure. The transient impact loads are discretized under the closed door and obtained using the inverse matrix (IM) method in TPA. Vehicle test and bench test are conducted. The closed door is subjected to the transient impact loads of the sealing strip and the latch on the body side. In the vehicle test, acceleration sensors are pasted on the target point and the reference point on the door to obtain the acceleration vibration response upon the door closure.

The frame of a low-speed electric vehicle was treated as the research object in the paper. The fatigue load of the frame was analyzed with multi-body dynamics method and the fatigue life of frame was analyzed with the nominal stress method. Firstly, the multi-body dynamics model of the vehicle was established and the multi-body dynamics simulation was carried out to simulate the condition where the vehicle used to travel. The fatigue load history of the frame was obtained from the simulation. Secondly, the amplitude-frequency characteristic of the fatigue load was analyzed. The frequency of the fatigue load mainly focused on 0~20HZ from the analysis. Thirdly, the modal of frame was analyzed. As the frequency of the fatigue load was less than the natural frequency of the frame, the quasi-static method was selected to calculate the stress history of the frame. Next, the fatigue life of the frame was analyzed based on S-N curve.

Gradient based topology optimization method is difficult used to optimization of crashworthiness structures due to the expensive computational cost of sensitivity analysis and complex nonlinear behaviors (geometric nonlinearity, material nonlinearity and contact nonlinearity) of structures during a collision. Equivalent static loads (ESLs) method is one of the methods for nonlinear dynamic response optimization. However, this method ignores the material nonlinearity. Thus this paper proposes an improved topology optimization method for crashworthiness structure based on a modified ESLs method. A new calculation of ESLs considering material nonlinearity is proposed. The improved ESLs method is employed to transform the nonlinear dynamic response optimization into a nonlinear static response optimization with multiple load cases. Each element in the design domain is assigned with a design variable.

Nowadays, the design and development of the sliding door has been gained great attention for its easy egress and ingress. However, most studies on the kinematic and dynamic characteristics of sliding doors were based on the commercial code ADAMS, while the accuracy of flexibility in modal synthesis method and the ability of complex contact condition may not be guaranteed. Thus, a new dynamic analysis method by using the commercial code LS-Dyna was proposed in this paper to take into account the complex deformation and boundary conditions based on the finite element model. The impact force obtained from the Ls-dyna was compared with that from ADAMS when their monitoring points speed and closing time maintained the same during the sliding process. The impact force between the rollers and the guides was employed as evaluation criterion for different methods because of its effect on the roller wear and the moving smoothness in the sliding process.

Carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) composites have gained particular interests due to their high specific modulus, high strength, lightweight and resistance to environment. In the automotive industry, numerous studies have been ongoing to replace the metal components with CFRP for the purpose of weight saving. One of the significant benefits of CFRP laminates is the ability of tailoring fiber orientation and ply thickness to meet the acceptable level of structural performance with little waste of material capability. This study focused on the concurrent optimization of ply orientation and thickness for CFRP laminated engine hood, which was based on the gradient-based discrete material and thickness optimization (DMTO) method. Two manufactural constraints, namely contiguity and intermediate void constraints, were taken into account in the optimization problem to reduce the potential risk of cracking matrix of CFRP.

Based on equivalent static loads method (ESL), a nonlinear dynamic topology optimization is carried out to optimize an automotive body in white (BIW) subjected to representative legislative crash loads, including frontal impact, side barrier impact, roof crush and rear impact. To meet the crashworthiness performances, two evaluation indexes are defined to convert the practical engineering problems into mathematic optimization problems. The strain energy is treated as the stiffness evaluation index of the BIW and the relative displacement is employed as the compliance index of the components and parts.

Thin-walled structures have been widely used in automobile body design because of its good lightweight and superior mechanical properties. For the energy-absorbing box of the automobile, it is necessary to consider its working conditions under the axial and oblique impact. In this paper, a novel hierarchical honeycomb is proposed and used as filler for thin-walled structures. Meanwhile, the crashworthiness performances of the conventional honeycomb-filled and the hierarchical honeycomb-filled thin-walled structures under different impact conditions are systematically studied. The results indicate the energy absorption of the hierarchical honeycomb-filled thin-walled structure is higher than that of the conventional honeycomb-filled thin-walled structure, and the impact angle has significant effects on the energy absorption performance of the hierarchical honeycomb-filled structure.

Off-road trucks, tractors and earth-moving machines are at high risk of accidents involving falling objects or rollovers. Therefore, these machines need proper protective structures to protect operators. This study investigates the crashworthiness optimization of a hydraulic excavator cab roof rail based on an improved bi-directional evolutionary structural optimization (BESO) method considering two different load cases (a lateral quasi-static load and an impact load from the top of cab, respectively). In the crashworthiness optimization problem, a weighted summation of external works done by the two different load cases is treated as the objective function while the volume of design domain is treated as the constraint. A mutative weight scheme is proposed to stabilize the optimization and balance the two load cases. Finite element (FE) model is established and two prototypes are fabricated based on the optimal design.

As a potential material for lightweight vehicle, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) has proven to perform well in optical behavior and weather resistance. However, the application in automotive glazing has seldom been studied. This paper investigates the defrost performance of PMMA rear window using both numerical and experimental methods. The finite element analysis (FEA) results were found to be in good agreement with the experimental data. Based on the validated finite element model, we further optimized the defrost efficiency by changing the arrangement of heating lines. The results demonstrated the frost layer on the vision-related region of PMMA rear window can melt within 30 minutes, which meets the requirement of defrost efficiency.

A novel geared electromagnetic active suspension is proposed in this paper. A pushing rod and a rocker are introduced to transfer the suspension vertical motion to the rotational motion of the motor. Comparing with the common ball-screw active suspension, it presents advantages of simple structure, easy manufacturing and module design. As the state variables of the suspension system cannot be all obtained for the sake of cost, taking the suspension deflection as the measurement, an output feedback LQR optimal controller is adopted, and it is concluded that the system can be stable with damping. Considering the nonlinearity of equivalent stiffness and unsprung mass caused by the system structure, parameter perturbation ranges are concluded through dynamic analysis, and robust H∞ control algorithm is proposed to realize the multi-objective optimization.

To overcome the shortcoming that vehicles with multiple steering modes need to switch steering modes at parking or very low speeds, a dynamic switch method of steering modes based on MOEA/D (Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition) was proposed for 4WID-4WIS (Four Wheel Independent Drive-Four Wheel Independent Steering) electric vehicle, considering the smoothness of dynamic switch, the lateral stability of the vehicle and the energy economy of tires. First of all, the vehicle model of 4WID-4WIS was established, and steering modes were introduced and analyzed. Secondly, the conditions for the dynamic switch of steering modes were designed with the goal of stability and safety. According to different constraints, the control strategy was formulated to obtain the target angle of the active wheels. Then aiming at the smoothness of the dynamic switch, the active wheel angle trajectory was constructed based on the B-spline theory.

There are a large number of uncertainties in engineering design, and the accumulated uncertainties will enlarge the overall failure probability of the structure system. Therefore, structural design considering uncertainties has good guiding significance for improving the reliability of engineering structures. To address this issue, the dynamic-static structural topology optimization is established and reliability-based topology optimization with decoupling format is conducted in this study. The design point which satisfying the constraint of the target reliability indicator is obtained according to the reliability indicators of the first-order reliability method, and the uncertain design variables are modified into a deterministic variable according to the sensitivity information.

Lightweight design is a key factor in general engineering design practice, however, it often conflicts with fatigue durability. This paper presents a way for improving the effectiveness of fatigue performance dominated optimization, demonstrated through a case study on suspension brackets for heavy-duty vehicles. This case study is based on random load data collected from fatigue durability tests in proving grounds, and fatigue failures of the heavy-duty vehicle suspension brackets were observed and recorded during the tests. Multi-objective fatigue optimization was introduced by employing multiaxial time-domain fatigue analysis under random loads combined with the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II with archives.

Optimization design of hard point parameters for hinge mechanism has been paid more attention in recent years, attributable to their significant improvement in dynamic performance. In this paper, the experimental analysis and dynamic optimization design of hinge mechanism is performed. The acceleration measurement experiments are carried out at different arrangement points and under different working conditions. Furthermore, the accuracy of established multi-body dynamics model is verified by three-axis accelerometer measurement experiment. In addition, sensitivity analysis for electric strut and gas strut coordinates is performed and shows that the Y coordinate of the lower end point of the electric strut is the design variable that has the greatest impact on the responses.

As the international community strengthens the control of carbon dioxide emissions, electric vehicles have gradually become a substitute for internal combustion engine vehicles. The battery pack is one of the most important components of electric vehicles. The strength and fatigue performance of the battery support plate not only affect the performance of the vehicle but also concern the safety of the driver. In the present study, the finite element model of a battery pack for fatigue analysis is completely established. The random vibration stress response analysis and acceleration power spectral density response analysis of the support plate for the battery pack are carried out, and the accuracy of the finite element model is verified by a random vibration test.

With the rapidly developing automotive industry and stricter environmental protection laws and regulations, lightweight materials, advanced manufacturing processes and structural optimization methods are widely used in body design. Therefore, in order to evaluate and improve the pedestrian protection during a collision, this paper presents an impact simulation modeling and structural optimization method for a sport utility vehicle engine hood made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP). Head injury criterion (HIC) was used to evaluate the performance of the hood in this regard. The inner panel and the outer panel of CFRP hood were discretized by shell elements in LS_DYNA. The Mat54-55 card was used to define the mechanical properties of the CFRP hood. In order to reduce the computational costs, just the parts contacted with the hood were modeled. The simulations were done in the prescribed 30 impact points.

The displacement of the shaft head fails to be accurately measured while the three-axle heavy-duty truck is driving on the reinforced pavement. In order to obtain accurate fatigue load spectrum of the suspension bracket, the acceleration signals of the shaft heads of the suspension obtained by the reinforced pavement test measurement are virtually iterated as responses. A more accurate model of the rigid-flexible coupled multi-body dynamics (MBD) of the whole vehicle is established by introducing a flexible frame based on the comprehensive modal theory. Furthermore, the vertical displacements of the shaft heads are obtained by the reverse solution of the virtual iterative method with well-pleasing precision. The accuracy of the virtual iteration is verified by comparing the simulation results with the vertical acceleration of the shaft head under the reinforced pavement in the time domain and damage domain.