In today’s rapidly evolving automotive world, reduction of time to market has prime importance for a new product development. It is critical to have significant front-loading of the development activities to reduce development time while achieving best in class performance targets. Driver-in-the-loop (DIL) simulators have shown significant potential for achieving it, through real time subjective feedback at preliminary stages of the vehicle development. Recent advances in technology of driving simulators have enabled quite accurate representation steering and handling performance, also good prediction on primary ride and low frequency vibrations.
In conventional damper development, the definition of the initial dampers tuning specifications typically requires a mule vehicle, or atleast, a comparable vehicle. However, this approach is associated with protracted iterations that consume substantial time and cost. This becomes even more critical when introducing new damper technology on all new vehicle platform. The proposed virtual development approach using a DIL simulator allows early selection of semiactive valve family and damping forces envelope before physical prototype build.
In current development firstly, AMESim based mathematical models of the semi-active dampers were integrated in the full vehicle model running on the driving simulator. A real-time control on damper hydraulic model was established through control logic functions based on virtual sensors feedback integrated into vehicle model. Secondly, virtual tuning loops were conducted where-in expert drivers were able to identify the most suitable semi-active valve and passive damper hardware combination, based on evaluations conducted on several driving scenarios. The controller logic functions, and the pro-active control function parameters were optimized to set-up baseline and tuning direction for physical development.
As consequence, the virtual ridework made it possible to set early development directions in terms of desired damping force ranges, valve architecture family and control logic configuration. The virtual tuning loops allowed to significantly reduce the tuning activity compared to the physical sessions. Furthermore, due to availability of fundamental semi-damper setup, provided strong baseline for physical development further expediting it.