Systematic development of vehicle suspensions having passive DOF and/or redundant constraint

Abstract

This Study provides a new systematic approach for the design of a mechanism having passive DOF and/or redundant constraints, with the specific application for the design of new vehicle suspensions. Suspension candidates having passive DOF are obtained by adding chains having passive DOF to the basic mechanisms that have neither passive DOE no]redundant constraint. In this way, we can handle those mechanisms that have passive DOE. Suspension candidates with redundant constraint can be obtained by transforming 2D planar mechanisms into 3D mechanisms having a similar motion pattern. The proposed algorithm has the advantage of effectively manipulating mechanisms that may have passive DOF and/or redundant constraints. Using this algorithm, we obtained 18 mechanisms that can be considered for the front suspension. To evaluate these suspensions, we analysed the kinematics of these candidates and performed dimensional synthesis for the desired toe and camber angle trajectories. In the results, we could identify some suspension candidates that have a smaller deviation from the desired values of toe and camber angle trajectories.