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

Authors: Joo-Gon Kim, Yong-San Yoon

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, KAIST3022, Daejeon, 305-701, Korea. ' Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, KAIST3022, Daejeon, 305-701, Korea

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 DOF nor redundant constraint. In this way, we can handle those mechanisms that have passive DOF. 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.

Keywords: dimensional synthesis; passive DOF; redundant constraints; type synthesis; vehicle suspensions.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVD.2005.007622

International Journal of Vehicle Design, 2005 Vol.38 No.4, pp.275 - 289

Published online: 20 Aug 2005 *

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