Rollover of Long Combination Vehicles: Effect of Overweight

The stability of long combination vehicles (LCV’s) has been the focus of research efforts in recent decades. Several characteristics of the vehicles have been analyzed to determine their influence on the vehicle stability calculation; however, the overweight is rarely analyzed. To conduct this research, the Davies method is used to obtain the static of the mechanism that represent the last trailer of the vehicle. Finally, a numerical case study is showed and the overweight, the longitudinal, lateral and vertical displacements of the gravity center are investigated. This study demonstrates that the overweight has important role on the static rollover threshold (SRT) calculation.