Assessment of Vehicle Rollover in Lab 2010-01-0530

The rollover problem had a great concern in the last few years, where various mathematical models for vehicle rollover were developed. The main parameters that are essentials for assessment of vehicle rollover are suspension stiffness, shock absorber damping, and tire stiffness and damping in addition to vehicle weight and geometry. It is a difficult task to change these parameters during a real vehicle dynamic testing. Moreover, such dynamic test is almost a destructive one due to severity of rollover crashes [ 1 ]. Also, a real vehicle dynamic testing has many disadvantages which cannot be easily avoided such as the effect of driver behavior, the cost of instrumentation and equipment, time consumption, and effect of outriggers on the vehicle roll mass moment of inertia.

In the present paper, the adoption of a scaled vehicle lab model (VLM) to study the effect of design parameters on vehicle rollover instead of destructive vehicle dynamic testing has shown its validity. This model includes modular sprungmass, unsprungmass, suspension springs, and tires. The assessment of rollover accident can be achieved experimentally through the analysis of the dynamic response of VLM model in addition to turntable test. The roll and bounce accelerations due to impulsive force are measured by shock test wheras the roll angle was measured using turntable test at different angular speeds. Comparison of the experimental results with that of the adopted mathematical model has shown a good agreement in a way that makes possible to study the effect of design parameters of real vehicles on rollover. These results have shown that the Vehicle Lab Model can be used for dynamic assessment of real vehicle rollover in the laboratory.