Real-time multibody simulation of vehicle wheel suspensions of different topologies with elastokinematic properties

Abstract Driving simulators are becoming increasingly important in vehicle development, as they allow test drivers to evaluate the driving characteristics of a vehicle at an early stage of the development process. Vehicle dynamics models used for such real-time applications are usually simplified to achieve sufficiently low computation times, especially with respect to the elastokinematic properties of the wheel suspension. This contribution introduces a real-time capable multibody simulation model for wheel suspensions taking into account their elastokinematics. The underlying data model allows the parametrization of different suspension topologies. Linear-implicit integration methods enable real-time capable integration of the underlying numerically stiff equation of motion without major model simplifications. It is shown how the computational effort of linear-implicit integration can be reduced by explicitly taking the suspension topology into account. A versatile process for the analytical online-linearization of the equation of motion of arbitrary suspension topologies is presented. Both a double wishbone and a multilink suspension are simulated with very high accuracy in real-time on a standard PC.