Compendium in Vehicle Motion Engineering

Report, 2021

This compendium is written for the course “MMF062 Vehicle Motion Engineering” at Chalmers University of Technology. The compendium covers more than included in that course; both in terms of subsystem designs and in terms of some teasers for more advanced studies of vehicle dynamics. Therefore, it is also useful for the more advanced course “TME102 Vehicle Modelling and Control”.

The overall objective of the compendium is to educate vehicle dynamists, i.e., engineers that understand and can contribute to development of good motion and energy functionality 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 the overall way of working there and defines required pre-knowledge from “product-generic” engineering, e.g. modelling of dynamic systems.

Chapter 2 also describes the subsystems relevant for vehicle dynamics:
• Wheels and Tyre 
• Suspension 
• Propulsion 
• Braking System 
• Steering System 
• Environment Sensing System