Control of the Vehicle’s Running Properties As a Pre-Condition for Designing Wheel Drive Systems

The paper presents a new approach of designing optimal wheel drive systems which improve considerably vehicle properties; including traction and velocity properties, fuel consumption, turnability, and ride stability. This approach creates the basis for synthesizing optimal circumferential wheel forces needed for designing optimum wheel drive systems for a particular vehicle. At the beginning the optimum circumferential wheel forces should first be computed. These forces correspond to the optimum values of vehicle properties’ criteria simultaneously taken in aggregate with the required vehicle kinematics. A single criterion optimization with limitation of the rest of criteria and limitation of optimized parameters is being presented. The objective function is being built for vehicles transporting a useful load. All these theoretical developments are followed by the results of the mathematical modeling and computer simulation of an 8WD vehicle. The modeling and simulation are based on a previously developed algorithm for the optimization of the circumferential forces among the drive wheels (see [8]).