Ride Dynamics

Chapter 6 dealswith road surfacemodelling and vehicle suspension systems, and their ride dynamics. A wide variety of car and motorcycle suspension configurations are now available. While most of these systems appear ‘very different’ from each other, many of their important properties can be analysed within a common ride-dynamics framework.The chapter begins with an analysis of the simple two-degree-of-freedom single-wheel-station (quarter-car) model.The validity of this model is discussed, and several of its properties studied, including its mode shapes, its invariant equation and the associated interpolation constraints, its frequency response characteristics, its design compromises, and its suspension component-value optimization.The singletrack suspensionmodel that can be used formotorcycles, and single-track carmodels, is then discussed, while in the last part of the chapter a full-vehicle suspension model is considered. The chapter finishes with some introductory remarks relating to suspension synthesis from a passive circuit-theoretic perspective.