With the rapid development of electrification and hybrid technology, the available space for automobile suspension systems is increasingly restricted, exacerbating the difficulty of hydraulic pipeline layout design. Existing layout methods mainly rely on manual trial and error assembly and lack a systematic methodology and quantitative evaluation framework, which limits design efficiency and reliability. In view of these limitations, this study proposes a simulation-driven multi-objective optimization framework for the hydraulic pipeline layout of automobile suspension systems. First, CATIA and IPS software were used to establish a dynamic suspension model and a flexible pipe model based on Cosserat rod theory, which can accurately extract key dynamic responses such as stress, bending radius, pullout force and gap. Then, key design parameters are determined and a Taguchi-based internal and external orthogonal array robust optimization method is adopted to consider controllable design variables and manufacturing uncertainties. In addition, by constructing a dimensionless equivalent response index, a novel stress-gap collaborative optimization mechanism is developed to incorporate stress performance and gap constraints into a unified evaluation index. Simulation prediction results show that the optimized layout effectively improves pipeline performance: the peak stress is reduced by 31%, the maximum pull-out force is reduced by 41.7%, and the minimum bending radius exceeds the design requirements, while maintaining sufficient dynamic clearance. Bench experiments and three-dimensional scanning results show that the simulated pipeline centerline and the measured spatial direction have a high consistency (more than 90%) at three typical suspension positions, confirming the accuracy and reliability of the simulated dynamic model. This study provides a systematic and quantitative design method for flexible pipeline layout, providing practical guidance for improving the reliability of automotive suspension systems and reducing development costs.
Chen et al. (Fri,) studied this question.