Abstract
At the initial design stage of a new vehicle, the chassis layout has the most important influence on the overall vehicle performance. Most chassis designers have achieved the target performances by trial and error method as well as individual knowhow. Accordingly, a general procedure for determining the optimum location of suspension hard points with respect to the kinematic characteristics needs to be developed. In this paper, a method to optimize the toe angle in the double wishbone type front suspension of the four-wheel-drive vehicle is presented using the design of experiment, multibody dynamic simulation, and optimum design program. The handling performances of two full vehicle models having the initial and optimized toe angle are compared through the single lane change simulation. The sensitive design variables with respect to the kinematic characteristics are selected through the experimental design sensitivity analysis using the perturbation method. An object function is defined in terms of the toe angle among those kinematic characteristics. By the design of experiment and regression analysis, the regression model function of toe angle is obtained. The design variables which make the toe angle optimized ae extracted using the optimum design program DOT. The single lane change simulation and test of the full vehicle model are carried out to survey the handling performances of vehicle with toe angle optimized. The results of the single lane change simulation show that the optimized vehicle has the more improved understeer tendency than the initial vehicle.