Snaking stability of articulated frame steer vehicles with axle suspension

A known problem of articulated vehicles is that snaking oscillations may occur at high speed. For ride comfort reasons, it is desirable to introduce suspended axles on articulated vehicles such as wheel loaders which are traditionally built without wheel suspension. This paper investigates how this may affect the snaking stability, by studying the vehicle dynamic behaviour of a multibody simulation model with and without suspension. Results show that an axle suspension may have a slightly destabilising effect, although the difference is small and can be offset by a stiffer or more damped steering system.