Vehicle motion engineering (2025 edition)

Bok, 2025

This book is written for the course “MMF062 Vehicle Motion Engineering” at Chalmers University of Technology. The compendium covers more than what is 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 courses, such as “TME102 Vehicle Modelling and Control”.

The overall objective of the compendium is to educate 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 can 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, and 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

The compendium is released in a new version each year, around October, which is the version you read now. A "latest draft" is more frequently updated and often includes some more, sometimes unfinished, material: file://file00.ita.chalmers.se/home/bengtja/www/VehicleMotionEngineering.pdf