New Column! CarSim 7 Applications

The roll out of CarSim 7 marks the introduction of the most powerful vehicle dynamics application on the market to date. We'd like to share some of the developments in CarSim 7 to aid you in doing your job more quickly and accurately. Because of this, we are introducing this new area of our newsletter in which we will be providing you with example applications and tips in order to maximize CarSim.

Testing Suspension Data Sets

Problem: When using vehicle dynamics simulation programs, users must input hundreds of variables to describe the vehicle under test.  One category of vehicle data that is always suspect is the data set for suspension properties. Users can experimentally measure the properties on Kinematics and Compliance (K&C) machines, but need to have confidence that the data set entered into the simulation accurately reflects the experimental results.

Solution: CarSim 7 includes a K&C test as an example in the software. Thus, when a user wants to check the validity of a suspension data set, CarSim 7 can run a suspension K&C test comparable to that which was run experimentally. The simulated response curves can be compared to the equivalent experimental plots. Or, experimental data can be entered into CarSim in ERD format and plotted as an overlay on the simulation plots.

Figure 1:

 

How Its Done: Figure 1 shows the animation of a simulated K&C test exactly like the experimental procedure. The vehicle body is restrained while the suspensions are exercised in ride mode (wheels on an axle are exercised vertical both individually and in tandem) and in roll mode (wheels are exercised out-of-phase). Then as shown in Figure 2, the calculated response variables are plotted in the same format as experimental data.

Contacts: If you would like to receive more information about this CS7 capability, contact Mechanical Simulation.

Figure 2:

 

 

Shows

Simulating Multiple Vehicles Web Seminar

Toyota Driving Simulator