Vehicle Dynamics Compendium

Report, 2020

This compendium is intially written for the course “MMF062 Vehicle Dynamics” at Chalmers University of Technology. However, the compendium covers more than included in that course.

The overall objective of the compendium is to educate automotive engineers for development of vehicles. The compendium focuses on road vehicles, primarily passenger cars and commercial vehicles. Smaller road vehicles, such as bicycles and single-person cars, are only very briefly addressed. It should be mentioned that there exist a lot of ground-vehicle types not covered at all, such as: off-road/construction vehicles, tracked vehicles, horse wagons, hovercrafts or railway vehicles.

Functions are needed for requirement setting, design and verification. The overall order within the compendium is that models/methods/tools needed to understand each function are placed before the functions. Chapters 3-5 describes (complete vehicle) “functions”, organised after vehicle motion directions:
·         Chapter 3: Longitudinal dynamics
·         Chapter 4: Lateral dynamics
·         Chapter 5: Vertical dynamics

Chapter 1 introduces automotive industry and defines/repeats required pre-knowledge from different traditional academic disciplines, e.g. modelling of dynamic systems.

Chapter 2 describes what interacts with the vehicles from outside, like wheels and tyres, aerodynamics and driver. Chapter 2 also describes the other subsystems relevant for vehicle dynamics:
·         Wheels and Tyres 
·         Suspension System  
·         Propulsion System 
·         Brake System 
·         Steering System 
·         Environment Sensing System