IMPROVEMENT OF RIDE AND HANDLING CHARACTERISTICS USING MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

In order to reduce the time and costs of improving the performance of vehicle suspensions, the techniques for optimizing damping and air spring characteristic were proposed. A full vehicle model for a bus is constructed with a car body, front and rear suspension linkages, air springs, dampers, tires, and a steering system. An air spring and a damper are modeled with nonlinear characteristics using experimental data and a curve fitting technique. The objective function for ride quality is WRMS (Weighted RMS) of the power spectral density of the vertical acceleration at the driver's seat, middle seat and rear seat. The objective function for handling performance is the RMS (Root Mean Squares) of the roll angle, roll rate, yaw rate, and lateral acceleration at the center of gravity of a body during a lane change. The design variables are determined by damping coefficients, damping exponents and curve fitting parameters of air spring characteristic curves. The Taguchi method is used in order to investigate sensitivity of design variables. Since ride and handling performances are mutually conflicting characteristics, the validity of the developed optimum design procedure is demonstrated by comparing the trends of ride and handling performance indices with respect to the ratio of weighting factors. The global criterion method is proposed to obtain the solution of multi-objective optimization problem.