Performance Measurement of Vehicle Antilock Braking Systems (ABS)

Outdoor objective evaluations form an important part of both tire and vehicle design process since they validate the design parameters through actual tests and can provide insight into the functional performances associated with the vehicle. Even with the industry focused towards developing simulation models, their need cannot be completely eliminated as they form the basis for approving the performance predictions of any newly developed model. An objective test was conducted to measure the ABS performance as part of validation of a tire simulation design tool. A sample vehicle and a set of tires were used to perform the tests- on a road with known profile. These specific vehicle and tire sets were selected due to the availability of the vehicle parameters, tire parameters and the ABS control logic. A test matrix was generated based on the validation requirements. The set of parameters to be measured were extracted from this test matrix to understand the demand on instrumentation, data acquisition and post processing of the acquired data. A cost effective yet novel instrumentation circuit was designed to perform the measurements. A brief description has been provided on the post processing performed on the acquired data. The results of this test have been discussed in details and the variations in results due to changes in test conditions have been analyzed. These results were finally used to validate the performance of the developed vehicle simulation tool.