Orthogonal Test Optimization of Vehicle Smoothness and Road Friendliness

The heavy vehicle brings large dynamical loads to the road surface, which would reduce the vehicle ride comfort and shorten road service life. Therefore the heavy vehicle handling stability, ride comfort, driving safety and initial road damage has attracted researchers’ wide attention. Based on the multi-body dynamics theory, a rigid-flexible coupled model of a heavy vehicle is proposed. The geometric parameters of the vehicle system, the nonlinear characteristics of shock absorber, the flexibility of leaf springs and the stochastic road surface are precisely considered in the built model. In order to study the interaction between vehicle and road, an orthogonal experiment method is adopted to obtain an optimal solution of the parameterized vehicle multi-body model. And an orthogonal optimization program for the vehicle model is presented to discuss the effect of vehicle parameters on ride comfort and road friendliness. After several virtual experiments and range analysis, the most important influencing vehicle parameter and its range are screened out. Thus a matching scheme of the best level of each parameter that affects the vehicle performance is achieved. The orthogonal optimized theory of the statistics is applied successfully to the vehicle ride comfort and road friendliness optimization, which offers a new way for improving the vehicle ride comfort and road friendliness.