Ride and Handling

Ride Parameters and

characteristics
Prepared by- Parth
Pandey
Contents:
• Introduction and definition of ride parameters
• The Ride rate
• The Ride frequency
• Roll Characteristics
• Damping
• Transmissibility
• Damping Curves
Ride Parameters

To design a car on paper, the following parameters should be selected:

• Ride rate : It is defined as vertical force per unit vertical displacement of

the tire ground contact with respect to chassis.

• Spring rate : The amount of weight required to deflect a spring one inch.

• Wheel Centre rate : Vertical force per unit vertical displacement at the
location along spindle relative to the chassis.

• Tire rate : vertical force/tire displacement at its operating load.

• Roll rate: Torque resisting body roll per unit degree of roll.

• Motion ratio: It describes the amount of spring travel for a given amount
of wheel travel Relation between MR
and Rates
The Ride Rate!!

Ride rate is derived by the combination of wheel rate and tyre

rate:

• Force travel from ground to the tyre and then to the spindle
• From the spindle the force travel to the knuckle and finally
to the suspension.
• In this process the tyre and the wheel and spindle contact
point are considered as 2 springs in series.
Hence,
The ride frequency

• It is the undamped natural frequency of the sprung mass.

• It can be derived through the use of ride rate.
• In passenger cars, ride frequency is around 0.5Hz- 1Hz.
• Generally, the rear ride frequency is kept higher than front to
match the front ride frequency so as to induce flat ride.
The Roll Characteristics
• Two sub-parameters are involved, Roll stiffness ,Roll gradient, roll
centre and roll axis.
• Roll gradient is the amount of roll generated (in deg) per lateral
acceleration (in g).
• Roll stiffness is torque applied (in N-m) per degree of roll.
• Roll gradient is the function of Weight of the car and the distance
between centre of gravity and roll centre.
• Note that the front and rear roll centre are different.
• The axis connecting front and rear roll centres is the roll axis about
which the car rolls
• Our objective is to reduce roll gradient and increase roll stiffness of
the suspension parts.
• Here the major role playing parts are, Anti-roll bar; Springs; Tires;
Wheels.
Mathematics involved

• Considering an ideal system:

• Torque to rotate the chassis about the roll axis: t t t t

Where KL is for left and KR is the right spring rate.
T =  K L + K R 
2 2 2 2
and ‘t’ is the track width.
2
T t K
K = =
• Roll stiffness if the K is same for left and right:
 2  57.3
• The total roll stiffness is given by:
K  t = K  Fs + K  Rs + K  devices
which involves front and rear roll stiffness and anti-roll bar stiffness.
Damping

• The vibration through the spring needs to be damped.

• It is a trade-off between the response time and the overshoot.
• Here, the governing variables are, critical damping point and
Damping ratio.
• More damping ratio means more response time.
• Although, if damping ratio is too high, the ride quality will degrade
as harshness characteristic will decrease.
Transmissibility
• It is defined by:

• Output amplitude is the amount of vertical motion of the

cabin after hitting the bump.
• Input amplitude defines the height of the bump.
• As we go faster, the frequency increases and at resonant
frequency, the transmissibility is highest.
• Here the key factors are damper velocity and damping force.
• In the last graph, after the cross over point, we can see that
lower damping ratio gives better transmissibility at high
frequency.
• As we desire for low transmissibility before and after the
crossover, we need to tune accordingly.
Damping curves
• Low frequencies mean a low damper velocity, High frequency means a high damper
velocity.
• So we want a higher damping ratio at low damper velocity.
• The slope of a F-V curve is a function of damping ratio.
• It is desirable to have high damping ratio in rebound and a low damping ratio in bump.
• Low damping ratio in compression because the damper only needs to control the
resonant frequency.
• High damping ratio in rebound because the damper needs to control resonant
frequency and the energy released
from the spring.
• Hence the magnitude of damping forces in a rebound are twice than the bump
compression.
• Problem with the 2nd graph will be that it will result in harsh road inputs to travel in
the cabin.
• Our target is to reduce the damping ratio at high shock speeds. This results in the 3rd
graph.
THANK YOU