A complex model of the suspension of off-road vehicles was developed by Renfroe Engineering Inc. for the purpose of designing suspension systems of vehicles such as ATV's motorcycles, and off-road pickups and has been presented in the literature in the past. This software has now been interfaced with a user-friendly input and output scheme that may be used by the engineering and racing professionals and the racing enthusiasts. This paper will describe briefly the mathematics of the model including illustrations of modelled vehicles compared to an actual vehicle as a validation of the logic and computations. Then the interface will be demonstrated showing how the user may make simple measurements of the vehicle and typical sets of rolling bumps and enter them into the computer which will then make complex calculations of the vehicle characteristics such as the vehicle sprung mass moment of inertia, centres of gravity etc. The model then processed this information to give the position of the centre of gravity, angle of the vehicle and wheel position every 1/30th of a second. This information is then animated on the screen to allow immediate evaluation of the design by the user. From this output, the designer can make adjustments of suspension components, such as a shock absorber damping coefficients, spring stiffness, tire stiffness wheel base etc. to view the performance of his/her design over a user selected terrain profile.
展开▼
