Improving Ride Quality on the Cab Suspension of a Heavy Duty Truck

Ride quality of heavy duty truck becomes important item, due to long distance transfer and long time driving This study describes how to determine and evaluate design parameters related to cab suspension system through time and frequency domain analysis The spring and damper-stiffness of the cab suspension system were optimized by two objective functions, which consist of cab pitching acceleration peak level and vibrational absorbed power Cab pitching is the main item which should be studied for ride quality In an attempt at optimizing, we made use of “Taguchi Method”,which was applied to experiments and simulation. We made truck cab model by use of DADS, which is dynamic analysis software,in order to find out the cab motions The results of simulation and test of a heavy duty truck gave us the optimum design parameters, which were verified and confirmed by real vehicle test