A Simplified Multibody Model for Vehicle Dynamic Response

This Master of Science Thesis focuses on the modeling of an automotive system. Several of the main automotive systems are combined to represent a full vehicle model. One system is a road plane model with degrees of freedom in yaw and lateral acceleration. The model at first includes a two dimensional representation of a steering system and then later expands the steering model to three dimensions. Also included is a five degree of freedom, two-dimensional multibody model in order to model the response of the chassis/suspension system due to an applied step steer input. The tire system incorporates the Magic Formula tire model. Furthermore, a graphic user interface is developed to facilitate setting up the initial conditions and inputs to the full vehicle model, and to ease the use of the simulation