Target-driven road vehicle suspension design

Licentiate thesis, 2022

This thesis is focused on suspension hardpoint and bushing compliance design with new reverse engineering methods that are based on kinematics and compliance constraints. The kinematic reverse design method is implemented into a conceptual front axle development. The results show that, using this method, the design lead time is reduced by half. It is concluded that the design of the suspension architecture can be more efficient and precise by automatic suspension design algorithms.

The wheel suspension is one of the most architecture-heavy systems in a car and much of the car’s overall motion characteristics and limitations are determined by it. Among other things, electrification, and fierce global competition place ever higher demands on faster and more efficient development of new vehicle concepts, even within a classic area such as mechanical wheel suspension design. The wheel suspension system has many design parameters and prerequisites that have very complex relations. Traditionally the development process has been dependent on very skilled engineering teams. A clear bottleneck in the development of a new wheel suspension today is how to balance the complex performance requirements
and which today require time-consuming calculations to evaluate for each iteration of the design. One solution to the above problem can be to look over the total development process, from target setting to verification, via re-design or optimization loops.