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The understeer of vehicle is desired for the vehicle's handling performance, and the roll rate of rear suspension is one of the key characteristics to achieve the understeer performance. A proper roll rate of the rear suspension is required to assure a certain level of understeer. Generally, in the vehicle dynamic tuning process, several methods are available for improving understeer performance, e.g., changing the hard-points of suspensions, adjusting stiffness of bushings, etc. On the other hand, structure optimization of components can be used in some case to improve the performance. In this paper, the optimization method is applied to the twist beam of rear suspension. The change in local geometry by optimized design leads to appropriate adjustment of the roll rate. Finally the vehicle understeer performance reaches design target.

Stiffness is one of the key points for research and development of vehicle body in white (BIW). Fast and effective evaluation of stiffness is very important for reducing the time and cost of research and development. How to realize weight reduction with proper stiffness is also a focus point of automobile design. In general, commercial software is used to optimize the BIW design. But the optimization process is time consuming. Therefore a simple but effective tool for fast evaluation is desired. A method to evaluate stiffness with sensitivity coefficients of sheet metal thickness of body structure is proposed in this paper. The simple mathematical relation of the sensitivity coefficients, the thickness variation of sheet metals, and the stiffness of body structure is established. The stiffness can be evaluated quickly for various combination of sheet metal thickness without running large-scale simulation using commercial software.