An Integrated Educational Tool for Vehicle Dynamical Response Studies

The automotive industry is today highly competitive, globalized, and characterized by continuous efforts to improve its products quality and reduce the products costs and time-to-market. Solutions to this paradox do not permit trial-and-error, necessitating instead the adoption of a more complex developmental paradigm. In this scenario the term “road-to-lab-to-math” describes the effort to reduce the quantity of on-road testing and replaces it with laboratory testing components and subsystems, and to so efficiently by using complex mathematical models that make evaluation of inuse conditions more precise and realistic. Due to this, Engineering Schools are turning attention to the use of simulation tools in the undergraduate courses. There are several commercial software packages developed to support the “road-to-lab-to-math”. If we focus on virtual prototyping tools applied to vehicle dynamic responses, all of the commercial simulation packages implement multi-body models composed of both rigid and flexible parts. It is possible to find on market several examples of these packages, such as ADAMS (MSC - USA), AutoSim (Mechanical Simulation Corp. - USA), DynaFlex (Waterloo - Canada), MECANO (Samtech - Belgium), RecurDym (Function Bay Inc. - Korea) and many others. Frequently these packages use a multi-body system approach to obtain the vehicle dynamic responses during maneuvers. Most of the commercial software packages are prohibitively expensive for mechanical engineering schools and students to buy them. In addition to this, usually these software packages do not have tools to permit more complex analysis, using for example Finite Element Modeling (FEM) and Operating Deflection Shapes (ODS). This forces the users to acquire other software packages to complete the dynamical response study. This paper presents the development and implementation in MatLab of an educational tool developed to help mechanical engineering students to understand and visualize the vehicle chassis vibration under given operating conditions (for example, during ride analysis). It is constituted of two integrated parts: the first one, a multi-body-based handling, ride, and comfort analysis toolbox called as MDV, and the second one, a CAD, ODS, and FEM analysis toolbox called as ADES.