A Comparative Study of Vehicle Handling Characteristics of Commercial Vehicle with Innovative Nonlinear Stiffness Mono-Leaf Suspension & Parabolic Spring Suspension through Simulation

In recent years due to significant increased cost of raw material, fuel and energy, vehicle cost is increased. As vehicle cost is one of the major factors that attracts prospective buyers, it has created specific demand for low weight and low-cost components than traditional components with better performance to meet customer expectations. Suspension is one of the critical aggregates where lot of material is used and reduction in weight tends to give lot of cost benefit. As suspension system derives vehicle’s handling performance, it has to be ensured that handling performance of vehicle is maintained the same or made better while reducing weight of the suspension.

Advancements in simulation capabilities coupled with manufacturing technology has enabled development non-traditional leaf springs. One of such springs is mono-leaf spring without shackle. This type of leaf spring provides advantages such as low weight and nonlinear stiffness. Hence, this type of spring can cater the need of soft spring and hard spring depending upon loading conditions to get better ride performance. As this type of spring doesn’t have constant stiffness; understanding kinematics and compliance of such suspension system along with its dynamic performance is very critical at design stage and it can’t be predicted easily by traditional formulas and calculations. Such system can be built in MBD software to predict its stiffness and kinematics of suspension & steering system. In this paper we’ve presented MBD model development process for new nonlinear stiffness mono leaf spring suspension using ADAMS and studied its effects of such spring compared to traditional leaf spring on kinematics and compliance of suspension. Also, studied handling performance of the vehicle through handling simulations in Truck Sim software with nonlinear leaf spring. At the last we have compared handling performance of vehicle with nonlinear leaf spring and vehicle with traditional parabolic leaf spring.