Suspension Components Calculation at Concept Stage to Evaluate the Ride and Handling Characteristics

Vehicle handing and ride are the critical attributes for customers while buying new passenger vehicle. Hence it is very important to design suspension which meets customer expectations. Often tuning of suspension parameters is very difficult at later stage like wheelbase, vehicle center of Gravity and other suspension parameters like roll center heights etc. A parametric mathematical model is built to study the effect of these parameters of vehicle handling and ride attributes at concept stage. These models are used to calculate the suspension ride rates, spring rates and Anti roll bar diameters for meeting target vehicle ride and handling performance. The model also calculates natural frequency of suspension and vehicle for understanding pitch and roll behaviours. The inhouse tool developed is used for calculating suspension damper characteristics and predicts ride attributes like Bounce damping, bounce stiffness, Isolation level, Flat ride and Impact Hardness categorized based on different road profiles. To predict the handling behaviour of vehicle, the analytical Load transfer is also evaluated based on the expressions. With this in-house tool concept stage performance of new vehicle and key suspension parameters are predicted to avoid costly and time-consuming changes at later stage of program.