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Suspension design is influenced by many factors, especially by vehicle dynamics performance in ride, handling and durability. In the global automotive industry it is common to “customize” or tune suspension parameters so that a vehicle is more acceptable to a different customer base and in a different driving environment. This paper seeks to objectively quantify certain aspects of tuning via ride optimization, taking account of market differences in road surface spectral properties and loading conditions. A computationally efficient methodology for suspension optimization is developed using stochastic techniques. A small (B-class) vehicle is chosen for the study and the following main suspension parameters are selected for optimization - spring stiffness, damping rate and vertical tire stiffness. The road is characterized as a stationary random process, using scaling and shaping filters representative of comparable roads in India and the USA.

In a highly competitive market, one of the major challenges for an automobile designer is to lower the product cost while improving the performance. Therefore, from the vehicle comfort point of view, achieving a good ride, handling and NVH performance, while satisfying the low cost and low weight target needs attention from the concept stage of the development cycle. To achieve this balance, it is important to optimize the static and dynamic stiffness of the vehicle body. This paper focuses on the effect of vehicle body stiffness on the ride, handling and NVH parameters. It also addresses the relation between static and dynamic stiffness of the vehicle. The correlation of the stiffness values with the ride, handling and NVH performance is also studied through various experiments on the actual vehicle

In a highly competitive global as well as the domestic market of the passenger car industry, the search for the complete car is on the forefront. With such a situation, carmakers are experimenting with innovative technology on various development programs to cater the needs of the customer. This paper shows one such experimentation to extract the basic suspension Kinematics & Compliance data with the integration of a Tri-axial Spindle Coupled road load simulator, a wheel force transducer and a Wheel Vector Sensor in absence of expensive Suspension Parameters Measuring Machine (SPMM).