Title: Dynamic analysis of a vehicle with leaf spring based on the hysteresis model

Authors: Jie Zhang; Gaoyuan Zou; Nong Zhang; Minyi Zheng; Bangji Zhang; Liqin Zhang

Addresses: State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacture for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China ' State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacture for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China ' School of Automotive and Transportation Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China ' School of Automotive and Transportation Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China ' State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacture for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China ' State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacture for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China

Abstract: Leaf spring is an important elastic component of suspension systems and their hysteretic characteristics can affect the vehicle's performance. Thus, the hysteretic behaviour of leaf spring needs to be accurately modelled in the vehicle suspension model. In the paper, a nonlinear model (Bouc-Wen model) of leaf springs is employed to describe the hysteresis induced by inter-friction between the leaves of leaf springs. The results illustrate that this proposed model can predict the restoring forces under the load test well. A numerical simulation has been carried out to show the effectiveness of this method. The Bouc-Wen model has a satisfactory expression accuracy for presenting the restoring force of leaf spring compared to the FEA model. The vehicle model with leaf spring based on the Bouc-Wen model is also developed to study the effect of hysteresis nonlinearity on the ride comfort in this paper.

Keywords: leaf spring; Bouc-Wen model; hysteresis; restoring force; ride comfort.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVP.2018.095309

International Journal of Vehicle Performance, 2018 Vol.4 No.3, pp.282 - 304

Received: 03 Jan 2017
Accepted: 14 May 2017
Published online: 03 Oct 2018 *

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