Comparison of the road-holding abilities of a roll-plane hydraulically interconnected suspension system and an anti-roll bar system

© 2017 Institution of Mechanical Engineers. This paper presents an investigation into the road-holding ability of a vehicle equipped with a roll-plane hydraulically interconnected suspension system. Ideally, the roll-plane hydraulically interconnected suspension system has the capability to decouple the roll mode from all the other vehicle suspension modes. However, anti-roll bars are unable to decouple the warp mode from the other modes, and therefore they limit the travel of the wheels and weaken the road-holding ability of a vehicle on uneven road surfaces. In this paper, vehicle dynamic analysis is carried out with three different configurations: a vehicle with only a spring-damper as a benchmark vehicle; a vehicle with a spring-damper in conjunction with anti-roll bars; a vehicle with a spring-damper in conjunction with a roll-plane hydraulically interconnected suspension. Simulations and corresponding experimental verification with different road excitations are then implemented. The experimental results agree well with the simulations under low-frequency road excitations. The results demonstrate that, when the vehicle undergoes off-road driving, the anti-roll bars weaken the road-holding ability of the vehicle while the hydraulically interconnected suspension system has a negligible effect