Modeling Brake Torque Hysteresis for Chassis Controls Hardware In the Loop Simulation

It is hardly a new trend for on road, vehicle intensive tuning and testing of chassis control features such as Anti-Lock Brakes, Traction Control, and Electronic Stability Control to move away from vehicle testing and towards non-vehicle test platforms such as Hardware-In the Loop (HIL) simulations and even further into pure math-based simulations. However, a significant acceleration of these activities has been occurring recently in the automotive industry, reducing or eliminating calibration time on vehicles and amplifying the demand for highly representative, non-vehicle test platforms to calibrate and even to validate chassis controls features. In current state of the air HIL simulation, the input (brake pressure) to output (brake torque) of each wheel brake in a vehicle’s brake system is modeled relatively simplistically, including at most pressure and brake temperature sensitivities, usually in lookup table form. Each brake corner contains over 20 different friction interfaces, which in turn can cause hysteretic behavior (a difference in the output for a given input, depending on whether the brake is applying or releasing against the hysteretic friction). This hysteresis is neglected in most state of the art HIL simulations. Past studies by General Motors have shown that the importance of brake corner hysteresis in vehicle level, customer facing performance of chassis controls features can range from inconsequential to significant. With the crescendo-ing demand for high quality non-vehicle based methods for assessing chassis controls function, the effect of hysteresis is no longer academic. The present study starts with HIL based simulations, establishing the effect of brake corner hysteresis on one of the most visible chassis controls behaviors. An inertia dynamometer based test was developed to exercises the subject brake corners to apply and release cycles, thus enabling any hysteretic behavior to be observed and characterized. Machine Learning models were trained with these data to represent brake corner hysteretic behavior, and then deployed into an HIL simulation rig. The impact of these models – representing brake corner hysteretic behavior – was characterized for straight line stopping distance on low, medium, and high coefficient road surfaces.