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Ride is an important attribute which must be accounted in the passenger segment vehicles. Excessive H point acceleration, Steering wheel acceleration, Pitch acceleration can reduce the comfort of the driver and the passengers during high frequency and low frequency rough road events. Excessive Understeer gradient, roll gradient, roll acceleration and Sprung mass lift could affect the Vehicle driver interaction during Steady state cornering, Braking and Step steer events. The concept architecture of the vehicle plays an important role in how comfort the vehicle will be. This paper discusses how to improve SUV ride performances by keeping handling performance attributes same or better than base vehicle. Multi Objective Optimization was carried out by keeping spring, bushing and damper characteristic as the design variables to avoid new system or component development time and cost.

Structural elastomer components like bushes, engine mounts are required to meet stringent and contrasting requirements of being soft for better NVH and also be durable at different loading conditions and different road conditions. Silent block bushes are such components where the loading in radial direction of bushes are high to ensure the durability of bushes at high loads, but has to be soft on torsion to ensure good NVH. These requirements present with unique challenge to optimize the leaf spring bush design, stiffness and material characteristics of the rubber. Traditionally, bushes with varying degree of stiffness are selected, manufactured and tested on vehicle and the best one is chosen depending on the requirements. However, this approach is costly, time consuming and iterative. In this study, the stiffness targets required for the bush were analysed using static and dynamic load cases using virtual simulation (MSC.ADAMS).