International Journal of Vehicle Performance (5 papers in press)

Regular Issues

• Occupational safety enhancement of EQ10 electric quadricycle through frontal rails optimisation  
  by Mohammad Abasi, Abolfazl Khalkhali, Seyed Amirhossin Ahmadi, Mohammadreza Mohammadi 
  Abstract: Electric vehicles (EVs) have recently garnered significant attention due to their environmental friendliness, decreased running cost and superior performance. Owning to the exponential growth of electric vehicle production over the past decade, safety inspections of EVs have become more crucial. Since the effect of the restraint system on the occupants safety has been already investigated, herein, the impact of the crumple zone characteristics on head, neck and chest injury has been comprehensively studied. In this paper safety assessment of electric quadricycle named EQ10 during the frontal crash condition has been considered. The safety parameters including HIC, Nij and chest deflection has been evaluated as three output parameters based on ECE-R94 standard. Taguchi and ANOVA approaches also have been applied to optimise safety parameters. The achieved data affirms that in the optimised aluminium structure, HIC has decreased by 32%. In the optimised steel, HIC has decreased by 33%.
  Keywords: L6e electrical quadricycle class; frontal crash; simulation and optimisation; safety evaluation.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJVP.2025.10073662
   
  
• A simulation method of wheel biaxial fatigue test for passenger cars using external drum  
  by Jintao Luo, Hongfei He, Yingchun Shan, Xiandong Liu, Yizhuo Wang 
  Abstract: Compared to radial and cornering fatigue tests, the biaxial fatigue test more accurately reproduces the in-service stress state of a wheel by applying simultaneous radial and lateral loads. This study proposes a novel finite element simulation method for passenger car wheels, incorporating both tyre dynamic rolling via steady-state transport analysis and the effect of tyre-wheel interference fit. The method is applied to a composite aluminium alloy wheel with different materials for the spoke and rim. Results indicate that stress distributions from the proposed and a simplified method are similar. However, the proposed method yields a higher maximum rim stress by up to 25.684% under certain loads, which is closer to the measured results by referring to the literature. This indicates that the proposed method is able to provide more accurate strength evaluation results of the passenger car wheel in biaxial fatigue test.
  Keywords: wheel strength; biaxial fatigue test; finite element simulation; tyre rolling; steady-state transport analysis; interference fit.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJVP.2025.10074116
   
  
• Height and posture control of air suspension with double-loop controller  
  by Hong Zhang, Xiaojun Xia, Lei Ye, Shuo Zhang, Yi Lu, Rui Chen, Hanwen Zhang, Hantong Zhou, Xueyi Yan 
  Abstract: Air spring suspension enhances handling performance and passability by adjusting vehicle height and posture. This paper proposes a control strategy to regulate vehicle height and posture using air suspension. A mathematical model of a vehicle with seven degrees of freedom is derived to obtain the state function for the controller and the plant model for verification. An air spring suspension is integrated into the vehicle model, and a corresponding control strategy is developed. The proposed strategy consists of two control loops: an outer loop using model predictive control to regulate height and posture by adjusting the target air pressure in the air springs, and an inner loop employing a PID controller to modulate the valve and control airflow. To validate the strategy, two simulations are conducted, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness.
  Keywords: air spring; height control; posture control; model predictive control; pneumatic system.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJVP.2026.10074757
   
  
• Improvement of NSGA-II algorithm and multi-objective optimisation of suspension kinematics  
  by Zhiyong Zhang, Hui Yu, Caixia Huang, Jie Zhang 
  Abstract: Multi-objective optimisation of suspension kinematics based on the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) is a widely adopted technical approach. However, the NSGA-II algorithm has several limitations. Therefore, this study aims to address these limitations and improve the algorithm. The improvement begins by introducing chaotic mapping for population initialisation, adaptive crossover and mutation rates, and a dynamic elitism retention mechanism, resulting in the proposed chaotic adaptive non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (CA-NSGA-II). The performance of the CA-NSGA-II algorithm is then compared with other algorithms to validate its overall performance. Lastly, the CA-NSGA-II algorithm is applied to the multi-objective optimisation of the kinematics in a double wishbone composite rear suspension system. The results show that compared with other comparison algorithms, the CA-NSGA-II algorithm has better comprehensive performance. When solving the multi-objective optimisation problem of suspension kinematics, it is superior to NSGA-II algorithm and can provide better solutions.
  Keywords: non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II; NSGA-II algorithm; multi-objective optimisation; suspension; kinematics; improve the algorithm; chaotic mapping; crossover and mutation; elitism retention; CA-NSGA-II algorithm; compared with other algorithms.
  
  
• Stability control of distributed-drive electric vehicles based on model prediction  
  by Zhaowen Deng, Yiming Zhou, Le Qiu, Wei Gao, Ming Li 
  Abstract: To improve the stability of distributed drive electric vehicles under extreme operating situations, a hierarchical direct yaw moment controller (DYC) was constructed based on model predictive control (MPC). The upper layer uses MPC to calculate additional yaw moment, while the lower layer uses quadratic programming algorithm to allocate driving torque. Furthermore, a joint simulation model is established by using Trucksim and Simulink, the simulation results show that the MPC control proposed in this paper can effectively reduce the peak value of side slip angle, yaw rate and lateral acceleration of the vehicle. Under the condition of double lane change, compared with LQR control, the MPC control is improved by 41.10%, 10.65% and 2.93% respectively; under the condition of angle step, compared with LQR control, it increased by 28.64%, 9.38% and 3.96% respectively. Lastly, the effectiveness of the control strategy was validated through hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test.
  Keywords: distributed drive electric vehicles; model predictive control; MPC; quadratic programming; direct yaw moment control; hardware-in-the-loop; HIL; direct yaw moment controller; DYC.