Influence of Inertial Properties on the Comfort of Road Vehicles

In this paper the comfort sensitivity to the variation of the inertia parameters is studied. For the theoretical approach, two computational models that predict the comfort response of a vehicle are developed and verified. These models are used to study the effect of a change on the inertial properties of the car on its comfort response. The models are developed on a commercial multi-body package and also implementing handwritten equations with a numerical integration algorithm. The influence of the inertial properties on comfort is also experimentally studied. Both approaches use two different road patterns as input generating a roll and pitch excitation. An allowed uncertainty on the inertia properties is proposed, based on the sensitivity to those properties.