Abstract
This paper presents a method to optimize the bump steer characteristics (the change of toe angle with vertical wheel travel) with respect to hard points in the double wishbone front suspension of the four-wheel-drive vehicle using the design of experiment, multibody dynamics simulation, and optimum design program. Front and rear suspensions are modeled as the interconnection of rigid bodies by kinematic joints and force elements using DADS. The design variables with respect to the kinematic characteristics are obtained through the experimental design sensitivity analysis. An object function is defined as the area of absolute differences between the desired and experimental toe angle. By the design of experiment and regression analysis, the regression model function of bump steer characteristics is extracted. The design variables that make the toe angle optimized are selected using the optimum design program DOT. The lane change simulations and tests of the full vehicle models are implemented to evaluate the improvement of vehicle handling performances by the optimization of front bump steer characteristics. The results of the lane change simulations show that the vehicle with optimized bump steer has the weaker understeer tendency than the vehicle with initial bump steer.
