This paper presents a multidegrees-of-freedom non-linear multibody dynamic model of a vehicle, comprising front and rear suspensions, steering system, road wheels, tyres and vehicle inertia. The model incorporates all sources of compliance, stiffness and damping, all with non-linear characteristics. The vehicle model is created in ADAMS (automatic dynamic analysis of mechanical systems) formulation. The model is used for the purpose of vehicle handling analysis. Simulation runs, in-line with vehicle manoeuvres specified under ISO and British Standards, have been undertaken and reported in the paper.

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This article presents transient handling analysis with a full-vehicle non-linear multi-body dynamic model, having 102 degrees of freedom. A transient cornering manoeuvre, with a constant steer angle and velocity has been undertaken. The effects of aerodynamic lift and drag forces have been included in the simulation tests. The vehicle handling characteristics with and without aerodynamic forces have been compared and various observations made. The aerodynamic forces have been predicted by a k-1 model solution of the Navier-Stokes equations for turbulent flow. The numerical predictions for the evaluation of aerodynamic lift coefficient agrees well with the scaled-down air tunnel experimental work, using hot-wire anemometry.

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