Multidisciplinary Co-Simulation of All-Terrain Crane With the Hydro-Pneumatic Suspension and Multi-Bridges Steering System

Hydro-pneumatic suspension and multi-bridges steering system, which can meet the demands of ride comfort and steering maneuverability of the crane by their excellent nonlinear stiffness and damping characteristics and innovative control technology in their electro-hydraulic rear axle steering system, is used for construction industry vehicles widely. Such systems have great influences on controllability, steering stability, driving comfort and safety of a vehicle. Such a complex system includes mechanical multi-body, hydraulic, and control components which are influenced each other. However, few previous works concerned the coupling effects from multidisciplinary view, in general just single domain detail model are built and studied. This paper presents a detailed 5 axle all-terrain crane with hydro-pneumatic suspension and multi-bridges steering system consisting of the mechanical parts of suspension and steering multi-body model with ADAMS, suspension and steering hydraulic model that contain cylinder, control valve, and hydraulic pipes, etc., and the control strategy are built with AMESim software. A co-simulation is carried out to study the handling and stability of the vehicle affected by the hydro-pneumatic suspension and electro-hydraulic steering system. Some typical handling maneuvers, such as cornering steering releasing test and pylon slalom course of test are carried out by co-simulation to evaluate the control strategy of the steering and hydro-pneumatic suspension performance numerically. Comparisons between measured data and simulation results validate the correctness of the model.Copyright © 2010 by ASME