Definition of new simulation scenarios for comfort and handling evaluation and application in a sensitivity analysis of damper characteristics

Competition among automotive manufacturers has increased a lot in the recent years. One of the main concerns regarding the suspension design of a vehicle is its ride comfort and handling performance characteristics. This thesis aims to create new methodologies for comfort and handling evaluation as well as to make a brief study regarding the influence that the characteristics of a damper have over the vehicle behaviour. The thesis is divided into two parts. In its first part, this thesis proposes new virtual road scenarios, some of which allow evaluating simultaneously ride comfort and handling performance during a vehicle dynamics simulation. These roads are created as a standard CRG format which can be used by different software in the field of vehicle dynamics. In its second part, a total of five different scenarios are chosen in order to study the differences that two different software and two different tyre models have over the results. Three models are used: Adams Car with FTire, Adams Car with MF-Tyre and CarMaker with MF-Tyre. Also, some metrics are defined for each scenario in order to compare quantitatively the results between these three models. Results have shown important differences regarding the tyre model in the impact scenarios and minor differences regarding the software in all scenarios except for the primary ride, which provides good accuracy using the simplest model: CarMaker with MF-Tyre. This configuration also presents much shorter running simulation time. Basically, the best configuration to carry out the simulation would be Adams Car with FTire model for all scenarios except for the primary ride, in which CarMaker with MF-Tyre model could be used too. Also within the second part, a sensitivity analysis is done. The original spline of the front damper is converted into a bilinear spline defined by six different parameters, which are modified at two different levels: 40% lower and higher than baseline. Then, the five scenarios previously defined are used to study how a certain parameter of the damper spline affects each metric. Apart from confirming the expected results (a low level of damping is needed to improve comfort while a high level of damping is needed to improve handling or road holding), this methodology quantifies and helps finding the optimum compromise between ride comfort and handling performance of a damper