Development of an axle design process for the chassis design within the early development stage

Abstract

The increasing cost-, competition- and time-pressure forces the vehicle design department of an automobile manufacturer to increase the digitisation level of their development processes. Therefore it is the target to economise cost intensive test carriers with the help of a valid and robust early development stage. The design of a suspension at the early development stage faces the challenge to solve a strong nonlinear, multi-criteria and overestimated optimisation problem. Thus, targets for the vehicle dynamics and vehicle comfort can be adjusted by a plurality of component properties, which have strong interdependencies and trade-offs. Therefore, a structured axle design method is required, which helps to quickly find a robust design of a vehicle’s suspension.