Technical Paper
A Deformable Chassis Model
2011-09-13
2011-01-2165
When modeling the dynamic behavior of a vehicle with a flexible chassis, it is often necessary to model the deformation of the chassis in order to obtain accurate simulation results. Typical solutions for managing the deformation of the chassis require a trade-off between model simplicity (e.g. lumped mass models) and model realism (e.g. multi-body models). In this work, a different approach for modeling the chassis is proposed where the chassis is permitted to deform in bending and torsion similar to how a real chassis would. The proposed chassis model is a simple finite element model of the chassis which offers realistic deformations with relatively low computational requirements. The proposed chassis model manages vertical and lateral bending deformations as well as torsional deformation.