Investigation of Vehicle Handling and Ride Comfort Oriented Cooperative Optimization

The characteristics of suspension elastic elements (i.e., spring, damper and anti-roll bar) are directly related to the handling and ride comfort performances, how to tune the characteristics of suspensions' elastic elements is always a big issue in developing the chassis of a vehicle. In this paper, a multi-body dynamics model of a passenger car within MSC.ADAMS® is integrated with iSight FD®, an optimization tool, to carry out a multi-objective optimization for improving the behavior of vehicle handling and ride comfort. The characteristics of suspension elastic elements (i.e., spring, damper and anti-roll bar) are considered as design variables. For handling, the objectives are defined by the measurements from multi-body dynamics simulation of typical double lane change according to ISO3888 standard. For ride comfort, the frequency-weighted RMS (Root Mean Square) value of vertical acceleration of the front seat rail according to ISO2631 standard is set as the objective. The optimization methods which is suitable to the multi-objective trade-offs in vehicle development are discussed, and some simulation results about the cooperative optimization between handling & ride comfort are presented in this paper.